


oh baby make 'em bodies

by cartographies



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Beast (The Magicians), Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, Bodyswap, Depression, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Hand Jobs, M/M, Multi, Queer Themes, Repression, Rimming, Self-Esteem Issues, Thigh Ride, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, bisexual awakening
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:53:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24439243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographies/pseuds/cartographies
Summary: Eliot’s face instantly brightens and he says, “Oh my god,multiple orgasms, we have to—”At the same moment Margo says, “Right, priorities, Ihaveto fuck someone with your enormous cock.”---One unremarkable day Margo and Eliot wake up in each other's bodies—it all spins out of control from there.
Relationships: Margo Hanson/Eliot Waugh, Quentin Coldwater & Julia Wicker, Quentin Coldwater/Alice Quinn (past), Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh, Quentin Coldwater/Margo Hanson, Quentin Coldwater/Margo Hanson/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 114
Kudos: 192





	1. april 13, 2016

**Author's Note:**

  * For [grimweather](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grimweather/gifts).



> This is the fic I auctioned for the [Not Alone Here](https://twitter.com/notaIonehere) fundraiser to raise money for [Queer Covid Relief](https://www.queercovidrelief.com/). The lovely **grimweather** won a 3-5k fic from me and requested 'marqueliot' and expressed a preference for 'season 1 no!beast AUs.' This is that, but also grew a strange life of its own, and has ended up being far, far longer. As a result it was not finished 'within a month' like I promised, but J was kind enough to let me post it as a WIP. I'm having an absolute blast writing this, and for such a good cause. Thank you both to them for bidding and to those who ran the auction!
> 
> Title from Google's incorrect lyrics for Tove Lo's banger "Talking Body"; the correct lyric is thematically relevant and I find the mistake a very satisfying queer prayer.

Margo wakes up Eliot’s body on a Wednesday in April of their second year at Brakebills.

“Oh, _fuck yes_ ,” she says as awareness sinks in, hand flying down—it takes a minute, this bitch is _long—_ to cup Eliot’s huge schlong in his huge fist. Oh, yeah. This is gonna be _great_. 

She isn’t alarmed, at least rationally. This is magic school. Shit happens. Her body—Eliot’s body—has a different idea. There’s a sudden, panicky tightness in the chest when Margo’s brain lazily wonders where her own perfect carcass is and who might be driving it. As she’s pissing—luckily the first order of business, she’s always wanted to do this—she takes a moment from being totally mesmerized by this basic bodily function to realize she’d just assumed that Eliot is Margo’s current pilot. Like, _obviously_. So she’ll go to her room and if that isn’t the case she has to find out who is in her and who the hell Eliot is and hopefully they can have some fun before they have to work this out. 

Margo brains herself on the doorway as she’s making her exit, not having calibrated navigating Eliot’s absurd dimensions. That sharper pain clues her in to the presence of the dull thud of Eliot’s hangover headache and she’s still clutching her skull when she reaches her own room. As she does the door flies open, and she’s staring _down_ at herself standing in the doorway. Sweet merciful _fuck_ , that is a trip. _This_ is what Eliot sees? She’s like a fucking Lego person. Also, looking at her own body from the outside. That’s really fucking weird too. 

Eliot, in said body, had unglued his hand from Margo’s left tit long just long enough to twist the doorknob, but it instantly flies back to its perch. So when he opens his mouth to say, “Bambi? Holy fucking shit, _”_ he’s cupping his—her?—breasts in both hands. Margo doesn’t know how she knew it was Eliot in there even before he said a word. She just did. It’s still a relief to hear those treasured two syllables, but also _fucking bananas_ to hear them in her own voice. 

Margo is smiling so wide it makes Eliot’s cheeks ache. “Holy fucking shit.”

A rumpled blonde head appears over Margo-Eliot’s shoulder. “Um, sorry, excuse me, Margo, I have to—I’m late for astronomy?” 

Oh, _right_. Last night had ended with Margo fucking Tabitha from astronomy class. Which she and Eliot are also late for, a fact she could not give less of a shit about. It had been fantastic. Margo had put her across her lap and spanked her with a copy of Tanaka’s slim yet groundbreaking _Pathways for Technomancy_ until she cried. Margo-Eliot blinks down at her in surprise, apparently having been too enraptured by suddenly being in possession of breasts to notice anything else. So, you know, Margo in sixth grade. 

“Oh,” Eliot stutters brightly, “uh, hi, right—” and because he’s the best boy in the world he then stops and looks to Margo for guidance. 

_Do you want me to get rid of her?_ _Let her down gently? Leave the door open?_ His—her own, fuck—eyes eloquently ask.

Margo lets Eliot’s eyes answer for her. _Good time, would screw again. Leave her wanting more_. 

Eliot—it’s both totally easy to fall into thinking this way, looking at herself and seeing Eliot, and also absolutely the most insane thing of her entire life—gives a small nod of perfect understanding. Great. That’s handled.

But. 

Then.

Margo watches in horror as her own eyes, though it doesn’t seem possible, increase in diameter by approximately 60%. In depth, lustre, and hot tenderness—a hundredfold. A white canine sinks into the smudged red of Margo’s lower lip as Eliot bites it. He’s fucking—he’s twirling her hair around her finger. His voice is a soft, well-fucked rasp, as he puts his hand on Tabitha’s lovely freckled shoulder and says, nervous and eager and intimate, “When can I see you again?”

Tabitha flushes pink from her sternum to the roots of her hair. A very nice sight, that wind-kissed shade, and one Margo had gotten to appreciate plenty last night, as she created it with her hands. 

Oh, so that’s what the beginnings of an erection feel like. Jesus _Christ_. Just like that? How does anyone with a dick function? 

This exciting new development is enough to distract her for just a moment from her mounting dread as she watches Tabitha basically melt. Her hand flutters up to her throat and her blue eyes take on a cartoon sheen as she fumbles out, “Oh, um, yes, oh my god, absolutely. Anytime. I mean, soon.”

“Wonderful,” Eliot purrs. “Last night was…” 

He trails off suggestively, batting his fucking eyelashes, causing Tabitha to trill out an overwhelmed laugh, and nearly break her neck as she trips down the stairs because she’s too busy craning her neck to look at Margo and smiling moronically to notice what her feet are doing or to have even registered Eliot-but-actually-Margo standing there. 

“Jesus, fuck, Eliot, I wanted you to make sure I could screw her again, not make her think I was about to propose marriage,” Margo says as soon as she hears the last footfall fade away. 

“What are you talking about?” Eliot turns to her with what Margo thinks is an attempt at a hair flip but ends in an epileptic thrashing of the neck that makes Margo wince even before Eliot yelps and mutters, “How is your hair that heavy?”

“Focus,” Margo says through gritted teeth. “What the fuck was that?”

“I have no idea what you mean, Bambi,” Eliot says, all innocence. “I have been a dedicated observer of the art that is Margo Hanson flirting. I just did what you would have done.”

Margo guesses that’s _technically_ true. The words were, on paper, very similar to what Margo might have said. But Eliot did it...differently. Margo could respond with the compelling argument that he’d certainly never look at one of hookups like _that_ , but whatever, not worth it right now. She can deal with whatever romantic complication Eliot has just created for her later. He’s right about one thing: Margo Hanson is a professional. So she has no idea why it feels like a vice has been placed around her ribs and the screws are slowly being tightened, all because of the minor hiccup of having to break a hot girl's heart. That’s a normal weekday. 

Eliot moves them right along, though. He’s running his hands all over Margo’s body and grinning as he says, “Oh my god, Margo. You feel incredible.” 

“Yeah, that body is a work of fucking art, you better be careful with it.” 

“No,” Eliot says, putting his fingers to his temple and shaking his head, squinting, “Like...inside? Last night must have been fantastic, because you feel...amazing.”

Margo blinks. Well, it had been fun, but she doesn’t know if it was all that. “I mean, I came like, four times? Maybe that has something to do with it.” 

Eliot’s face instantly brightens and he says, “Oh my god, _multiple orgasms_ , we have to—”

At the same moment Margo says, “Right, priorities, I _have_ to fuck someone with your enormous cock.” 

They beam at each other, before Eliot’s face goes virtuously sober. “Then we have to figure out how to get back in our own bodies. Obviously.“

“Obviously,” Margo agrees, before Eliot grins again, and grabs her by the hand to haul them back to his room. 

*

“Oh, go ahead,” Eliot says, at Margo’s attempt at a respectfully inquiring look. They’re sitting side-by-side on the edge of Eliot’s bed and her hand is already on her—Eliot’s—crotch.

“Consent is important, El,” Margo demurs, and then Eliot is watching her take his cock out of his underwear and into his own hand, her eyes closing in rapture and her mouth stretching into a grin. 

Her cock, her hand. His eyes, his mouth. _Hers_ is more accurate, Eliot thinks. This is far stranger than even the wildest trip of his life and at the same time suddenly not strange at all, as Margo’s sheer force of personality simply renders Eliot’s face and body her own with this evidence of her enjoyment. He watches, mesmerized, as Margo strokes his cock to hardness. After a moment her eyes flutter open, and she turns to look at Eliot, forcing his eyes up from where Margo is leisurely toying with herself to meet her gaze. Her eyes are dreamy, but her smirk is sharp as ever as she flicks her gaze pointedly downward to his—Margo’s—own crotch. “Oh, come _on_ , don’t you want to?” 

Eliot had gotten distracted, but. She’s right. He can honestly say he’s never been as eager to touch a pussy as he is Margo’s. Like, as a general rule, but he means specifically never as eager as he is in this moment, when it’s in his possession. He’s gotten Margo off and watched her get herself off and seen and helped people get her off and it all looks like a great time. 

He starts by touching Margo’s breasts which are, for the moment, his. He always likes touching Margo’s boobs. Their heft and silky warmth fill him with a profound feeling of comfort, a rare sense of the rightness of the universe. Like stroking a rabbit, or something. A chinchilla. Something soft and nice to touch, and so perfectly sized for and submissive to that touch that you almost can’t believe that there’s probably an evolutionary purpose to the fur or the tits, to protect against the cold or to nourish young—ew—but instead it must only exist because it feels wonderful under your hands. 

Margo would say, yeah, no, there isn’t another purpose, because that chinchilla was put on this Earth to be made into a coat for me to wear. She has one such coat from her grandmother.

(“—not that she’s dead and left it to me or something, that bitch is very much alive. I stole it from her closet before stealing Daddy’s new Mercedes-Benz and getting the hell out of dodge.”

“You didn’t like your grandmother?” Eliot had ventured politely. 

“Oh, no. I love that miserable old cunt, and she’s gonna outlive us all. I call her every six months, and honestly I think the theft delighted her. She can’t stand my dad either.”

“Interesting,” Eliot replied. “What happened to the car?” 

“I totaled it.”

Eliot hadn’t needed to ask what had happened to the coat. It had been four a.m., they’d come home from a night on the town still wound up and giggly, and Margo had begun pulling out the contents of her wardrobe, until finally, naked underneath, she’d donned the magnificent garment, and they’d sat cross-legged, knee-to-knee in the middle of her magically expansive closet, and told wild stories. Margo’s, he thinks, were mostly true. It’s an oddly clear memory: Margo in nothing but pearls, grey fur slipping off her shoulder, gesturing with an ivory-tipped cigarette holder she’d found somewhere, eyeliner smudged, both of them laughing laughing laughing, as Eliot dreamily rubbed his fingers over and over against the otherworldly softness of the coat at the hem of the sleeve, a thing of such wonder that he remembers drunkenly thinking it could only have been pulled from a chest of fairy treasure.) 

Anyway, it’s a trip to cup her breasts in her hands to tease at the nipples in the way he knows Margo likes and to feel the corresponding pleasure—from the way it could make Margo’s back arch he’d imagined it sharp and electric, but it’s a slow oceanic ripple, radiating out. Not a bolt up the spine, but a cat stretching in a patch of sunshine. There’s a responding throb between his legs, where he woke this morning—next to a blonde girl lying on her stomach and drooling into the pillow beside him, ass red and scratches up her spine, which was cause for a moment of real alarm that shifted into a feeling a proprietary pride when he realized whose body he was in—with a pleasant, well-used feeling. It’s fascinating to catalogue their divergences, as he slides one hand between his legs to find himself wet already. It’s not the familiar empty ache of having been fucked hard the night before, but a different memory of use, of parts being flush with blood, over and over, again and again. _I came like, four times_ , Eliot remembers Margo saying in his voice, as he brings pleasure to himself through her, as he seeks—

(Okay, so. If Eliot were hypothetically called to account for his sexual relationship with Margo, his first instinct would be to say that it wasn’t even about sex. This isn’t true, but it comes easily because everything about his desire for her feels very different from his desire for men. But it’s like, _okay_ —he remembers being new to New York, and having worked up to courage to walk into a very very expensive store for the first time, and walking up to a very very expensive shirt and touching it, awed and frightened and ravenous, with just the tips of his fingers, and as he did so seeing this vision of himself as a person who might own such beautiful things, of being the person who could wear them, becoming that person and being seen by the world as that person, and feeling a frisson that he would bizarrely qualify as one of the more powerfully erotic experiences of his life. That’s what it’s like, with Margo. The finest whisky and the thing that makes him believe he has a right to drink it. She’s beautiful boys, glamorous locales, the thing that renders Indiana void with a glance—and also irreducibly, helplessly herself. Once early in their first year there was a professor visiting Brakebills to give a guest lecture, an expert in the field of weather magic, Italian, around fifty, beautiful and terrifying and during her demonstration Margo had leaned over and said to him, “I don’t know if I want to be her or if I want her to put her—” and as Professor Morante’s irate glare found Margo’s with laser precision Margo’s—Margo’s!—mouth had snapped shut with an audible click of teeth. That’s how it was, with Margo. Eliot obsessed with her remarkable self-possession, wanting desperately to siphon off a little bit of it for himself.

What does Margo get from it? He doesn’t presume to know. But he remembers one time they’d fucked, early on, Margo riding him lazily and he’d found himself stroking her hair over and over, mesmerized by it’s softness and fragrance and then he’d realized what he was doing, something for which another guy would have been at risk of his fingers for presuming, and he’d snatched his hand back but Margo had blinked her huge eyes open and smiled at him and murmured, “No, that feels nice,” and he’d been inside her but this is what he remembers, her eyes like lanterns and the silken texture of her hair sliding under his fingers as he carefully so carefully once again smoothed his hand adoringly over her small head, and he thinks maybe—maybe that’s it, for her. That giving, and taking, but who can say who is doing which?)

—and finds and touches his clit, rubs at it, feels that familiar pulse of blood made new, with the way it’s concentrated into this much smaller, secretive piece of flesh, but also the sensations it causes are more diffuse, tidal. He feels it in his fingers, in his toes, the back of his knees, places he’d never thought of as having erogenous possibilities. Everything down there is so, so wet—like, is this _really_ necessary—so wet and hot and open. He feels something—not building, no, it’s like. It’s like he’s about to—he’s on the edge of—there’s something coiled, tight, tense within him, and if can just find the latch, the switch, he can—there’s this great pressure, immense heat, something boiling, boiling within him and if he can just get the fucking lid off, everything will be—free, expansive, _it_ will overflow the bounds, and he’s almost, _almost_ there—

When a hand clamps down on his ankle. Margo has turned around and is staring at him. One foot on the floor, the other knee braced on the bed. Working her cock while she watches Eliot who is herself rub one out. “Stop,” she says, sounding pained. “Stop, I’m gonna…”

“I was _gonna_ ,” Eliot grits out, feeling himself pull away from that precipice, feeling wild. “I was about to—stop fucking touching it, then!” 

Laughing Margo’s raspy sex laugh. Because Margo can’t, she can’t stop touching her cock all the time, marveling at this miraculous organ and what you’ve just discovered it can make you feel, and with such ease, just stick your hand down your underwear beneath your comforter covered in different types of _sports balls_ and think of the sweet-eyed non-threatening boys gracing the pages of the Tiger Beat you’ve stolen from one of your endless female cousins. 

(“Quentin looks like he should be a boy band member. Or playing a teen on the CW.” Margo, musing. A party at the cottage, back in what, September, October. Golden days. “The hair. The extreme symmetry of his features.”

“I thought you said he wasn’t that cute.”

“He isn’t, really. Because that’s _boring_. Except he’s not a boy band member. I think it’s his height. He’s short, so he developed a personality.” 

A lot to process here. “Aw,” Eliot says first, overwhelmed by happiness. His friends are getting along! “You think he has a personality?” 

Margo rolls her eyes. “Not a _good_ one. But at least there’s something there to save him from being totally dull.” 

“ _Are_ all boy band members tall?”—tangent, to argue about the heights of One Direction’s members—then: “Wait. I’m tall. Do you not think I have a personality?”

“Your face is _interesting_.” 

Eliot is so offended that he storms off before she can say anything, but later she explained that his face’s _idiosyncrasies_ mean he both developed a personality and possesses true beauty. They’re in the technology hut googling the heights of One Direction, and they all turn out to be pretty short, so there goes Margo’s whole theory of male beauty, probably, but Eliot chooses to be flattered. He just objects to Quentin’s exclusion from this category, because Eliot thinks his face is—plenty interesting.)

“Stop,” Eliot commands, putting all of he and Margo’s considerable combined top energy into his tone. Of course it doesn’t work on Margo. “Stop,” he entices, syrupy-sweet. “Stop and I’ll give you a show.” 

Margo takes her hand away from her cock as if pulling magnets apart. Puts her hand, wet, on the outside of Eliot’s leg, gripping his shivering thigh instead. He takes a moment to look at his cock, standing free and proud against his stomach, swollen and red and yes, it really is huge. He lets a feeling of satisfaction suffuse him.

Eliot was almost there. Margo had yanked him back from some wondrous discovery, but he feels magnanimous. Open, filled with love. So he smiles at her, slow and hot. Arches his back, a patented move he’s seen dozens of times. Hears her breathing pick up. Slides his other hand down the length of her lithe, toned body, so admirable and appealing to Eliot for the effort he knows Margo puts into it. Watches Margo’s eyes flick between his hand between his legs as it begins to move, and his face as he bites his lip and arches his back for real, because he’s coming, coming, coming, the tide rushing back in, the kettle screaming, a door flying open. That’s fucking _fantastic_ , holy shit.

Eliot opens his eyes to see Margo watching, slack-jawed. “You’re such a narcissist,” he pants, fond. 

Margo scoffs. “Like you aren’t.”

But maybe he’s less of one than he thought. Because Margo says, “I want to eat myself out,” and Eliot is more than happy to oblige, imagining the furl of tongue gentle against clit and stronger against slick giving flesh, but when he looks down and sees himself kneeling between Margo’s legs, something about the sight of Margo’s self-assured, lustful avarice on his own face hits him the wrong way. It’s not that Eliot hasn’t done this before and enjoyed it, happy to make Margo happy, proud to be the one responsible for her gasps and moans, fascinated by being able to observe the mutual gift of pleasure free of the fog of a sharper hunger. It isn’t as if he’s not done this for an audience and very much enjoyed the picture he knows he makes. He likes to do this for a certain kind of boy in particular, one that seems wary of Eliot’s presence but willing to tolerate it if it means he gets Margo in the bargain. This same boy wants Margo so badly he can’t see straight, would _die_ to get his cock inside her, but also probably thinks giving a girl oral is kind of gross. Eliot likes the double shock it causes, the homo eating pussy with relish. He likes to show off, provide a nice object lesson: _it’s worth it, to get her screaming like that._ Eliot liked being wet to his chin, Margo limp and satisfied, as he hauls the boy in by the back of the neck to kiss him. Gets his tongue in the boy’s mouth when he gasps, in shock—first at the man kissing him, then at the taste of cunt that he sucks off Eliot’s tongue when he starts kissing back. A strange feedback loop of perversity. Then, Margo, like a queen with her wise and laughing eyes, watches as Eliot takes that boy apart, makes him feel things he’s never felt before. 

Margo’s eyes are riveted to her own face, and so she must catch a flicker of Eliot’s unease. “No?” she asks, gentle. 

Eliot shakes his head. “Not right now,” he says, hating to disappoint her in anything. Margo just smiles at him, bites playfully at his hip, rests her chin on his knee as she looks at him.

“This is so fucking weird,” she says. “I feel high.” 

Then, after dropping a kiss on his knee, Margo shimmies up the bed to stretch out beside him. Eliot’s own face is easier to handle when it’s closer up, somehow, and then it isn’t hard at all when his girl gives him her dirty grin. “Multiple orgasms, right?”

Margo rests her hand on his belly. A question. Eliot says, “yeah, fuck—” and Margo slides her palm down to cup his pussy in her palm. There’s a gentlemanly sort of pause before she asks, “Okay, El honey?” and there’s something about hearing that husky, solicitous tone of his own voice, hearing a version of what he’s said to a dozen boys—the boys that start repulsed and stiff, standing on a laughable machismo to hide from themselves the fact that although they were in bed with Margo Hanson, Eliot was also there, only to find those weak defenses crumble entirely sometime in the night, and then they’re face down, shaking, frightened at the pleasure Eliot is drawing forth from their bodies with every movement of his hands, and Eliot is tender, overflowing with grace, as he pauses, asks, gives them the chance and the choice to say no, to get up, put on their clothes, leave the room, forestall any further inconvenient revelations, grants them the gift to stay forever in that moment before they might have to _know_ , or maybe he curses them with making the choice to leave that moment, a moment Eliot himself had never had, only for them to say: _no, yes, please, more, oh my god_ —it has Eliot feeling small, delicate, easily bruised, at risk of injury, something to be handled with infinite care, and it hits his brain just right in a way he doesn’t understand, and he gasps, as Margo begins to move her fingers slow slow slow against him, making his whole body fizz, his knees champagne flutes.

It’s false, on multiple levels. Margo is a force despite her body’s tiny dimensions, and even when animated by Eliot’s less redoubtable spirit, it’s not like Eliot is ever— _this—_ this quivering animal thing, this instrument of revelation. But he uses Margo’s body to allow him the lie, knowing she won’t mind. She’s watching her own face, as Eliot in it blinks wetly, cries out, pants and sighs. She’s hard against his hip. 

“Yeah? Good?” 

“You know it is,” Eliot says, as he comes down panting from another orgasm, as Margo gives him a moment to breathe before she presses back in with her thumb, relentless, he’s squirming and wet nearly down to his knees, he’s soaking his comforter, it’s totally gross and weirdly amazing and he laughs as he demands: “Bitch, put your fingers in me already, oh my god.”

Margo does, and they feel huge, and that’s exciting, and he laughs out, “Fuck, we haven’t even kissed yet,” and Margo—giggles, is that what he sounds like?—says, “What the fuck, you’re right.” Then they’re kissing, and it’s just about his favorite thing, kissing Margo. Her fingers move strong and hard and sure in him as she braces herself on one arm above him and they kiss and kiss. He feels the rasp of her stubble against the incredibly smooth skin of his face. Margo is rubbing herself off against his belly, and it’s one of the most erotic things in the world to Eliot, that furtive desperate high school rutting. He hears Margo gasp, feels her jerk as the sensitive skin of her cockhead drags against Eliot’s stomach, making him wet, just as her fingers are making him so wet, and then he’s coming again. Eliot really throws his entire theatrical soul into it as his cunt seizes around Margo’s fingers, as Margo stops kissing him and pulls back to watch a full-body shiver radiate out from her fingers in him, up his glistening taut stomach, out to his spasming arms and fingers and legs and toes, to his eyes rolling back up into his skull.

“I am _so hot_ ,” Margo says, satisfied. She touches the pool of come on Eliot’s stomach, because of course watching herself orgasm was enough to make her go off early. His perfect little narcissist. Eliot watches, dumb with satiation, as the come slides towards his belly button, but Margo makes a disgusted noise, smacks him lightly on the side of the head, and moves her fingers in a tut to make the semen disappear. Magic is great. (“Come on, hopefully you won’t be in my body anymore to feel it, but I will, and you know how it feels when it gets in there and—” “ _Crusts up_ —” “Exactly, I know I screwed your brains out, but have some respect, that is a _rental_ —”)

After this soothing patter, they turn toward each other. Lie side by side on Eliot’s pillows and look at their own faces. The curtains had been opened to allow them to see, but, blinking and wincing, (“This wine headache is wicked, honey, how much did you and Q drink?”) Margo performs another quick tut to plunge them into an obscuring dim. Bright morning light just peeking at the edges of the windows. It’s only 10 AM, Eliot guesses. Today’s classes are a bust, but whatever. It feels so comforting, to lie in this sex-scented artificial dusk, with Margo. The pillows smell like himself, and right now that fills him with an odd feeling of safety.

“I didn’t want my first experience of having a dick to be splooging you like a teenage boy,” Margo says mournfully.

“That’s an essential first experience of having a dick, so welcome.” He gives the side of Margo’s face a kindly pat. The expression on that face isn’t easy to discern in this light, but he still feels discomforted at having to look at himself. And it’s simply very wrong that he can’t tuck Margo under his chin. But he can always roll over and let her be the big spoon, that’s a classic they can manage. “Fortunately I am a virile young fellow. My refractory period is short.”

Margo sighs, not yet consoled. She bounces back quickly: “Ooh, do you think you’re up to blowing yourself?” 

“I think that can be arranged,” Eliot replies. It comes out a bit slurred, drowsiness overtaking him. 

They doze for he isn’t sure how long, tangled together. Eliot wakes up and Margo is gone, but she returns shortly, triumphant, in possession of a small feast. 

“Did you run into anybody?” 

“Nope. Ghost town.”

Eliot wonders if anyone would have known that it wasn’t Eliot in there. If there would have been sign, some essential Eliotness missing. Maybe, but it must at least be clear that some essential Margoness is present. He wonders, if he were to walk outside in his current form, what reaction he would get. Imagines men leaping up to open doors for him with one smile, one flick of his eyelashes. No idea who was really in there—but then that’s no different from normal. They never did. Imagines running into—well. 

Margo does not cook but has a talent for slapdash decadence and so they eat cheese and charcuterie and smoked salmon and fresh bread and grapes, and then Eliot rolls Margo over and slides down and sucks the head of her dick into his mouth, takes it onto his tongue. There’s an initial instinct for some stage-setting, to shift things into the competition they both find so exciting, _we’ll really see who’s the better cocksucker now_ , but it's washed away by an unexpected tenderness. He can let Margo feel this, really _feel_ it, know it in the singing of her blood. This thing that to Eliot was worth nearly dying for, that it was worth living through Indiana to get to have. A boy who adores you sucking you off. Every part of that sentence is a lie or a half-truth or a distortion and yet it’s also the truth. Another falsehood: that there’s anything new he can show her. He thinks of the sight of Margo between a girl’s thighs, that ravenous joy, thinks of her today, the wolfish, unashamed satisfaction in her eyes, as she felt her own body clench around her fingers and watched Eliot feel this old discovery made new through her. Now Eliot can make it new for her. They can experience it together, this time. 

Margo gasps. Eliot hears himself gasp—that shock, that anything can feel this good, that it’s possible to feel that good. Margo jerks in his mouth, hips rising off the bed. Eliot pulls off, pinches her hip. 

“Come on, you know better than that.” Taking the time to gather his hair into his fist, hold it back. Does that look hot? Eliot always thought it looked hot, but _doing_ it just makes him think of watching Margo hurl into a toilet, before Eliot stepped in and held her hair back for her. 

“Sorry, sorry, _Jesus_ fuck, El, no wonder you assholes are so obsessed with this.” 

Eliot grins, sucks her back down. Gags on himself. He _is_ big, and he usually fucks guys with smaller cocks than his own. Huh. It’s not like he never _noticed_ that pattern before, but there’s noticing and _noticing_. Which he is, at the burn of trying to work the head of Margo’s cock into his throat, eyes watering. She’s being good now, although he can feel a muscle on her thigh jump under his hand. He rubs his palm against it, soothingly, remembers her saying _I want to fuck someone with your enormous cock_. Eliot imagines it, feels a responding pulse in his borrowed pussy. Girls get wet and so it’s less of a _process_ , which is actually a negative for Eliot. Although it still takes a certain amount of patience, to work himself inside Margo. The cock in his mouth gets easier to take then, his throat opens to swallow around Margo more easily, as he thinks of this, of getting well-fucked by his own truly huge dick, and he’s delighted to feel it make him wetter to think of it, and he dreamily drags his lips back up in a slow drag, really putting on a show for her, as he imagines it, that he’ll get to know an approximation of that ache felt between the legs of every boy he’s fucked, and it’s easy to swallow the bitter taste of himself as Margo abruptly comes in his mouth, petting at his hair, laughing. 

They sleep again, for a while. They’ve entered that feverish twilight where time loosens its hold, as you are reduced to nothing more than an animal body, with its animal needs and animal hungers. 

They wake, Margo’s hard-on against Eliot’s ass, and then, as in a dream, he’s on his hands and knees.

—He got like this, eighteen, discarding his virginity with glee, finally by choice destroying the pretense at straightness that no one had ever actually allowed him to have. He’d spent some time crashing on his cousin Megan’s couch, long-worshiped cool cousin Megan, the only worthwhile member of his entire accursed family, the one who at seventeen ran off with a punk band she’d sneaked out to see in Indianapolis and never looked back, who sent Eliot postcards and mixtapes and phone numbers for all her weed hookups around town, who had a baby at nineteen and became the other family black sheep not because of the baby-out-of-wedlock in itself but because instead of coming home with her tail between her legs, penitent and filled with regret, she’d been proud of her lovely baby and not only _not_ married the kid’s father she’d dumped that piece of shit and moved alone to New York City instead and Eliot had followed the path she’d blazed—

Margo is pressing in to him, with just the head of her cock, as Eliot opens for her, panting, knees slipping against the sheets as he hears Margo’s punched out breath, her soft, “ _fuck_ , oh, my god,” as she desperately tries not to simply shove up in there as far as she can go, that overwhelming primal urge that Eliot knows so well it’s like he’s actually feeling it, like he’s experiencing both being fucked and doing the fucking at the same time, and he circles his hips slowly, bears back on a tremulous outward breath, as he takes just another couple inches of himself. _Jesus_.

—and Eliot would go out all night to find the men, men, men. Preludes: the first time Eliot checked a guy out in a club and knew it was welcomed, knew he wasn’t going to get his face bashed in. The first time Eliot had a drink bought for him. A mass of sweating frenetic bodies dancing. Standing outside a bar, just waiting for some beautiful boy to put a cigarette in his mouth and pat at his pockets, glancing at Eliot out of the corners of his eye, waiting for Eliot to offer him a light. Then: sex with men, cherished longing fulfilled and better than he could have hoped. _Cocks_ , small and large and thick and thin, cut and uncut, cute and beautiful and endearingly ridiculous and arousingly ugly, hard and thick in his mouth, yet so _vulnerable_ too, so absurd and sublime, the most delicate treasured part of a man in between his lips and teeth and he could make those sounds fall from someone’s mouth, _Eliot_ was doing that, and he didn’t care what anyone said: it felt holy. That good musky smell at a man’s groin, at his armpit. Soft dark hair on inner thighs. Sucking a ball into his mouth like a lollipop. The feeling of getting just the head of his dick into the tight clenched heat of an asshole for the first time, and somehow, patience, dedication, repositioning, the sweetness of nervous laughter, absurd amounts of lube, fitting all of himself inside—

Margo just keeps saying, “Oh my god, oh my god,” as she slips further inside, and yes—that’s all Eliot could say too, then and now, _oh my god._

—he’d stay out all night, stumbling from whatever club whose bathroom he’d blown a guy in or the apartment he’d fucked someone in, and walk the streets, Eliot Waugh didn’t _stay the night_ , but he also couldn’t go back to Megan’s and wake up her cute daughter, so he’d walk and walk, skin on fire, until dawn came. Then he’d stumble back to Meg’s, shirt plastered to himself with rank booze sweat, reeking of sex and smoke, and Meg would be getting ready for work, having already dropped the kid off with the old Ukrainian woman across the hall, and she’d just quirk her eyebrow at him and give him a hit off the morning joint she was smoking. Eliot would sit on the toilet in her filthy little bathroom and they’d pass the spliff back and forth and he’d watch mesmerized as she put on her make up until one morning she caught his curious gaze in the mirror and turned around and with an expert flick of the wrist applied some dark purple eyeliner on his lowered trembling eyelids as he swayed with exhaustion, and he’d blinked his eyes open to meet his own face in the glass and found himself made new. _You have to teach me how to do this_ , he’d said, awed, and Meg had said _sure thing_ —

“Fuck, wait,” Eliot says. God, that ache. He’s so wet and open, so turned on, it’s absolutely the weirdest feeling of horniness he’s ever experienced, which is, like, really saying something, but it’s _intense_ , and still—it’s a lot to take. Margo holds still, he can feel her shaking but she takes the time to rub an admiring hand up over her own ass, pull his cheeks apart to look at where she’s splitting him open. 

“It’s been a minute since I’ve fucked anyone with a horse cock, sorry,” Margo laugh-gasps, “I need to do exercises or something, k-keep in shape.”

Eliot tries to be good, tries not to go there in his own head, now, but it still rises up, intrudes: the thought of who Margo’s been fucking, lately.

But Eliot shakes it off. Spreads his knees wider, and wow, Margo _is_ really onto something with all the yoga because it’s one easy movement, a graceful undulation of the spine, to shift so his ass is in the air and his breasts are brushing against the bed, and that makes him gasp, makes him melt a little, and he feels it so, so deep, as finally she slides all the way in. 

—and he and Margo had gotten like this after they fucked the first time, high off not so much the sex in itself as the adoration the sex served to more sharply transmit. They’d rolled around on her bed for a week, only emerging for food. But of course if sex sometimes briefly blesses you with an ecstatic unconsciousness of time it also is a path back to time, there’s no getting away from it, the flesh drags everything along with it. Make sure it's the good things, that’s the trick. Letting a boy fuck his up into his fist in an alleyway smelling of cat piss led directly, in a way that is impossible to explain unless you’ve felt it, to that moment in Megan’s bathroom, window cracked and chill morning air washing away the marijuana fug, radiator clanking noisily, her calloused thumb gentle on his jaw, smell of coffee on her breath, as she _does his face,_ which shesays in that 40s starlet voice that is their familiar shared vernacular from the many hours spent lying in front of the television on the tangerine carpet at their grandmother’s house watching TCM.

Margo, Margo, Margo. The way there was an electric crackle in the air when their eyes met across a crowded room. The miracle of the first time he made her laugh. Goosefleshed and unbound and seen at the Trials. It all led to the moment where to Eliot's own surprise he realized he wanted to kiss her and since he was no longer in the business of denying himself the things he wanted that's what he did and Margo had kissed him back. To the look in Margo’s eyes when they broke apart, to Eliot's fear of what she might say, the inevitable questions that would force him to make an account of himself, and how through those questions the specter of everything else would enter into that tiny sacred space between their mouths. How instead she’d looked and looked at him and asked just the one—

Now it’s easy, Margo’s really fucking into him, and Eliot moans, face down ass up, a position of vulnerability that he’s up to performing but that he can only really give himself over to when it’s Margo. Eliot wiggles his hand between his body and the mattress to touch the stretched rim of his pussy, to rub right above where his clit is slick and throbbing. He gasps and gasps, words fled. Thinks of the body he’s in, Margo’s body, that she uses so well for her pleasures. _It’s been a minute since I’ve fucked anyone with a horse cock._ And she approaches fucking like Eliot does: with ingenuity and style and effort, something that can be perfected. So there’s no need to—if she’s been fucking—what was her name, Tamara from astrology, girls and girls and girls, with their fingers and their tongues—except Eliot is intimately acquainted with the breadth of Margo’s tastes: the collection of silicone cocks in her drawer, in a range of sizes and colors (Eliot’s preference: firmly middle of the range, bright purple), memories of watching a girl work her fist into Margo, Margo’s head in Eliot’s lap, of stroking her hair off her forehead as she moaned and sweated and smiled up at him with incongruous sweetness. 

So if it’s been a while since she’s had anything approaching the size of Eliot’s dick inside her, and Eliot knows it has, intimately, from the presence of that good burn that’s making his legs shake, it’s because she’s been fucking one person in particular. And he’s small, slender, _cute_ , with a perfectly proportional cock to match. Eliot assumes. He can’t know for sure because he hasn’t let Margo say a word about it. But _he’s_ probably still nervous, eyes darting back and forth between his cock entering Margo and her face, worried about hurting her, wanting to make sure it’s _good_ for her. Or maybe Margo throws him down on the bed and climbs astride him, presses his cute dick to her pussy, as he gulps, stutters, a flush down his chest, throat working, big eyes dark and wet. _He’s been inside me_ , Eliot thinks hysterically, and. _Goddamn it._ Listen, your honor, Eliot had _tried_ , he tried real excitement, dildos and fisting oh my (fuck, he’d have no idea about— _anything_ , he better not, because it doesn’t bear contemplating that Margo has gotten to—) and all these speculations were useless pathetic diversions (but _god_ , does he have lovely hands, capable and strong and gentle at once, and Eliot insanely finds himself thinking of how they’d come back to the cottage together a few weeks ago to find a small bird with a broken wing on the porch, and he had picked up this poor wounded thing and held it in his hands, made soft soothing noises, had asked, “Is there, like, a wildlife rehabilitation center somewhere nearby, do you think?” like Eliot would have any clue, and then suddenly the bird had shot from his cupped palms and taken off into the sky and Eliot had said, “Whoa, what did you do?” and he’d replied, just as baffled, “I just thought— _I wish I could fix it’s wing_ , and—”) from the true destined course of his thoughts, the thing that has obviously fucking unhinged him: Quentin Coldwater’s dick, Quentin Coldwater’s hands, Quentin Coldwater’s everything, that’s what he’s thinking about as he chafes his rental clit raw and comes so hard he’s maybe crying. 

After, they lie side by side, panting. Eliot stares up at the ceiling and tries not to think. The room is swimming. The ceiling spins and heaves. Eliot tries to anchor himself in physical sensations. That sweet ache between his legs fills him with a proprietary, manly pride. _I did that_ , he thinks. But this body has turned treacherous. It provides no escape from his thoughts. The second he thought of Quentin Coldwater the road it promises out of himself became a closed loop, leading always back to his hopeless, pathetic heart.

He’d made dinner for Quentin and himself last night and then they’d opened a bottle of wine and sat in the common room drinking it. Taste of wine in his mouth. Feeling of fullness, of plenty. Warmth of the fire in the persistent cool of the spring evening. Sound of birds in the dusk trees outside the window. Quentin’s boy-smell, overlaid with the smell of clean laundry. Watching Margo lead her girl of the evening up the stairs by the hand. Eliot had looked away from Quentin politely, while watching his expression from the corner of his eye. Quentin had ducked his head and blushed, his mouth quirking in seeming amusement. He didn’t look upset.

_It’s a friends-with-benefits thing_ , Margo’s ghostly voice had echoed in his head. _Extremely chill._

Eliot had been upset with Margo. To be able to fuck Quentin Coldwater and to choose not to—

“Jesus cunting Christ,” real-Margo groans beside him. “That was...I feel...”

“Fucked out?” Eliot says, amused again.

“Hm, no,” Margo says, shaking her head. She’s slid down so her head is resting on Eliot’s shoulder. He’s pretty sure this means her feet are hanging off the bed. “I’m still in good shape to sexually rampage with your massive weiner. But it raises some questions. Obviously, morally, I’d have to let whoever I’m fucking know it’s me in here…”

“Less fun?”

“What? No. I’m not really hot for catfishing people in your body.” 

Yeah, haha, obviously. Eliot isn’t either. 

Margo is still idly musing: “...but it raises the question of who would be down for that.”

“Most of the female population of Brakebills, I like to imagine.”

He can feel Margo’s smirk against his skin, and he can feel her eyes when they come to rest on his face. “Mm. Tempting. But I think it’d feel too...I don’t know.”

Eliot thinks maybe he does know. He meets her gaze and smiles at her. Strokes her hair. “Yeah, maybe not.” 

“This is fun though,” Margo says with a sleepy return grin. She yawns—wow, that’s unattractive, Eliot should henceforth yawn as little as possible—and lays her head back down.

“Mhm.” It's been a minute, since he and Margo were together like this. Nothing to do with Quentin. Or not only. They just have their rhythms, ones that easily admit fallow periods and mutual indifference. 

Eliot’s eyes feel heavy. It’s getting late. Red evening light casts the room in a furnace-glow. 

“And we have to figure out how to get back in our own bodies. Obviously.” 

Obviously. This is an interesting adventure, but neither of them wants it to be permanent. Solving it will mean first visiting Henry, always delightful, and apprising him of this wild development with his favorite students. The Dean will then say it’s not his fucking problem and then Eliot and Margo will have to figure it out on their own which means lots of time in the library and probably getting themselves blown up. Less delightful. 

“Let me feed you dinner first,” Eliot says.


	2. august 8, 2015 - march 9, 2016

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for a depressive headspace, brief suicidal ideation, and one reference to a past suicide attempt.

The account Quentin Coldwater might have given of his first year at magic grad school at 4:36 p.m. on March 9, 2016, went something like this: 

He found out magic was real, and that he was a magician. He’d been walking through the evening streets of Brooklyn in summer, smelling the familiar scents of garbage that has baked all day in oppressive heat and exhaust from the endless cars whose beeping and squealing and honking formed the background track to his agonized musings about Julia, and Yale, and how he and Julia and James were all going to graduate school at Yale, Quentin for philosophy and Julia for law and James for his MBA, to yet another apartment paid for by Julia’s mother, relocating this inescapable pyschosexual swamp to New Haven—when, and later he’d never quite been able to recall the sequence of events that led to this, he’d stumbled through a hedge into an Arcadian paradise, everything green and growing and alive, hallowed by soft golden light, and in the light birds singing, bees humming, and Quentin walked up a verdant lawn like a carpet rolled out just for him, to arrive at a wall which later will be revealed to be a very average sort of wall with the words _Brakebills University_ set in a dull institutional font, but which at the time had seemed like something mythic, a boundary from legend, largely due to the fact that upon it sat a being that seemed to naturally belong there, in his glamor and ease and _magic_ , to belong as much as bees and birds and grass and sun-warmed brick. 

This, then, was a magic place. A magic university that wanted Quentin to matriculate there. Goodbye Yale, and goodbye James. Because as their child-selves suspected there was indeed something special about the two of them. Quentin and Julia were _magicians_. The doubts that had gnawed at Quentin, even at the age of nine—that it was all some lucky fluke, some cosmic joke that smart funny bold Julia had chosen to bestow her energy and attention on Quentin, and one the universe would figure out a way to rectify eventually when Julia went to reign as a queen in Fillory and left Quentin behind in New Jersey—they had all finally been dismissed as groundless by that same universe, which maybe had some order or reason to it after all. 

Quentin was—well, he was only so stupid. It’s not that he was dumb enough to believe that the presence of James was the only thing standing in the way of Julia realizing it was Quentin she really wanted. He’d thought that when he was seventeen, maybe, when James first came into the picture and on good days he could imagine that it was only his existence that had prevented Quentin from asking Julia to senior prom and Julia saying yes.

He would never have asked. He would have never actually forced Julia into having to turn him down.

Still, it was hard not to feel like it was all a sign. The universe had put its stamp of approval on Quentin and Julia’s belief that they were special, had banished Quentin’s fears that Julia was destined to leave him behind. Surely with James gone from the picture—

(Julia had tried for a while, Julia had explained that she’d decided to put off Yale, and Quentin for some reason had too, and James, who infuriatingly to Quentin had always been a person of rather heroic patience, had accepted the explanation of an abruptly decided upon deferment due to a fabricated Adderall addiction, a gap year to figure some things out, and again, Quentin was there, and Quentin is such a nonentity that Julia didn’t worry this might be perceived as a threat and indeed James didn’t perceive it that way. Julia had tried to maintain regular phone calls, kept up her apartment in the city for weekends where James had come to visit her despite the weight of his course load, had tried, tried, tried. In the end it wasn’t the effort and stress, conditions that Julia thrived under—but Julia having finally gotten up the nerve to break up with James and James finally being fed up enough to accept it, the thing was, as she told Quentin, crying, as they stood outside the library watching sheets of rain pour off the roof as they shared a cigarette— _it’s so hard when I can’t share with him the—it’s like the biggest, best part of my soul, you know? And I can’t ever tell him about it, I can’t ever let him see it.)_

—surely then, the universe having so neatly gotten rid of Quentin’s nine-year old fears, _surely_ the fact that it was Quentin and Julia who were destined to share the biggest, best part of their souls—this love of magic—that had to be evidence of the logic of the equation that Quentin had worked out privately, where this was a portent that there was a relief to come for the other torment, the one that had appeared at puberty and dominated Quentin’s adolescence thereafter: that he loved Julia, and she would never love him, not the way he wanted her to. She’d leave him behind, because somewhere Quentin knew he wasn’t meant for the kind of love that Julia had assumed so easily with James, the one that the entire planet smiled on. Quentin was too strange and sad and uncomfortable in the world to be worthy of it, and so although Fillory wasn’t real she could still leave him behind for the charmed realm of marriage and family. 

Well. His equation was shit. 

Julia was a knowledge student. The rarest of all disciplines. Julia was the brightest and most brilliant, always. 

Quentin didn’t get a discipline. 

Getting ahead of himself. Julia threw herself into Brakebills wholeheartedly, eyes shining. The Dean’s special pet from day one. She had been assigned to a room with an incredibly intimidating girl with a mane of dark hair. _This is Kady,_ _she knows all kinds of shit, battle magic, her mom’s a hedge, she grew up doing magic, come on Q, she’s going to show me…._

Quentin was already several paces behind. What was a hedge? Why did Julia’s voice go hushed with awe on _battle magic_? His head hurt, and his new meds and how quickly everything was moving made him nauseous, and of course Quentin’s roommate hated him and was mean and Julia’s roommate was this super special pure blood magician or whatever, and he knew Julia was only inviting him along out of the old force of habit, have to make sure Quentin feels _included_ , but Julia was already turning to bestow her radiant smile on Kady and Quentin can picture it, trudging along after them, but he didn’t need to do this anymore because he’s a fucking magician too, thanks. 

So he said no and laid down on his bed and stared at the ceiling, hating himself. Wanting immediately to take it back, run after them, because he knew the self-torture he’d be in for later, endlessly wondering what he’d missed, what he’d cut himself off from by being—himself. He always did this to himself. Quentin then heard the clatter of footsteps on the stairs headed in the direction of his door and got to his feet in case—Julia came back for him. She did, sometimes. Still. He didn’t want to be lying in his classic wallowing position if she does. But it wasn’t Julia after all. 

Quentin threw out his meds. The Dean said he would no longer need them, that indeed he never had needed them. Quentin’s suffering had been a case of false diagnosis all along: he was a magician, and he just hadn’t known it. 

It seemed too easy but he grabbed at it anyway. He’d never needed much excuse to throw out his meds, to stop going to therapy. They’re so burdensome, so much work, and they might make life something approaching bearable for small stretches at a time but it always proves illusory. Still, maybe the Dean was on to something. There’s no dramatic backslide. Quentin felt focused, keen, the gray fog burned away with the fire of magic, and his need to keep it now he had it.

Because magic didn’t come naturally to Quentin. It came to Julia so easily, but Quentin felt from the first as if he was moving through water in his quest to understand, to keep up with her. Julia’s graceful fingers moved effortlessly, through all of Popper, and then on to increasingly complex things. Quentin’s fingers felt thick, dull, made of clay, and he grew to hate them in an active way as he worked through the basics for weeks, lagging behind. He couldn’t even maintain his psychic wards which Penny Adiyodi hastened to assure him was _extremely basic shit, Coldwater, get it together._

There was someone else in their class for whom magic seemed to come with a spellbinding ease. Quentin watched Alice Quinn’s delicate glass horse take shape, a thing of wonder that she seemed ashamed of, and felt such mingled awe and frustration that he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Magic came so easily to her but she was so angry about it. She was the only one at Brakebills that seemed as uncomfortable as he did. Ridiculous, to be that gifted at magic, to be that beautiful, and still be so unhappy. He felt drawn to her. That old sick hypnotic pull of fascination. 

Alice rebuffed most of his friendly overtures, those first few weeks. Then one evening Quentin had sat down at her table at the library, which was covered in books that appeared to have nothing to do with any of their classes. In theory Quentin was studying but in practice he’d mostly snuck glances at Alice’s sharp, fierce face, with occasional exciting detours to getting glared at when he attempted conversation. Then Alice had sighed heavily, put down her pen with a thump and said, _if you’re going to be here, you might as well be useful._

Which is how he’d gotten involved in Alice’s quest to find out what happened to her dead brother. The spell she needed to attempt to summon him apparently required two people. 

An empty classroom at midnight with the scent of herbs Quentin didn’t know the names for sharp in his nostrils and Alice Quinn lovely and disdainful in the flickering candlelight. Quentin did the spell with her and despite his labored movements meaning they had to do the spell twice, to his companion’s palpable annoyance, the moment where it seemed to work, where they were moving in tune with one another and it was as if they became one body and this joint body became a vessel through which the power to shape matter and alter time moved—that was worth it. It was like nothing Quentin had ever felt before. He’d looked at Alice’s face to see if she felt it too, but she’d been looking at the mirror, peering into the darkened corners of the room, searching for something she could not find and cursing in frustration, kicking over a mortar and pestle in her haste to flee their failure.

Because Alice’s brother was dead. She’d begrudgingly ground out her admittance of this tragedy and Quentin had experienced further mortification when she only turned more acidic at his poor attempt at sympathy. 

This noble mission was nearly derailed by their expulsion. Turns out summoning magic is a big no, and although nothing happened this time that was, well, not luck, actually, but a sign of Alice’s talent, her impressive control evident in the fact that she was able to prevent things she didn’t from coming through the doorway she had after all succeeded in creating, even if she had not had corresponding success in beckoning her brother through it. 

Not that the Dean knew who they had attempted to summon. The spells lingered in the classroom, unmistakable the moment Sunderland entered Monday morning, and apparently it was an easy matter from there to trace who was responsible from there. _What in God’s name were you trying to do?_ When Quentin looked at Alice he caught a flash of true desperation breaking through her typical cold fury for just a moment, and without thinking he’d found himself blurting out that they’d been attempting to contact his Grandma Joan beyond the veil. 

The contempt on the part of the Dean was to be expected, but Quentin felt that from Alice it was a bit much. 

Fogg obviously didn’t believe them, and he kept trying to catch Alice’s eye, but Quentin kept loudly insisting that the fondest wish of his heart was to once again smell the menthol and baby powder scent of his Grandma Joan, who had been mean as hell and lived in Florida and died when he was eight and of whom he could not recall a single fond memory. 

Finally the administration was forced to admit defeat although even Quentin was not sure why his expulsion should be taken as such: surely the Dean should be relieved, to retain a student such as Alice and lose one like Quentin. But with visible reluctance he pronounced Quentin would be expelled and Alice put on probation. Quentin was to collect his things and clean out his room and wait for a specialist to arrive to mindwipe him. 

Of course he immediately went to Julia. He hated himself as he bounded off the steps of the main building and ignored Alice’s call of _Quentin, wait_ , he hated himself as he rushed through the campus he had taken in with wonder so recently, telekinetics defying the laws of physics and Josh Hoberman holding court under an oak tree, selling magical drugs that could make people hear color and smell emotions and see into other dimensions, and which Quentin would now never get to try, as he passed by Penny, sneering and half-shirtless, who shouted after him _Damn Coldwater where are you booking it to?_ He hated himself as he opened the door to Julia’s room in the Knowledge attic and startled her where she was studying on her bed, blessedly alone for once, hated himself at the instant concern that flooded her face, the worry in her eyes when he choked out _I really fucked up Jules, they’re going to kick me out_ , hated himself at the pathetic fear in his voice, the fact that he instantly runs to Julia to get her to fix it like always, hated her as exasperation began to mix with the worry, her scolding, _Quentin, god, that’s so risky—_ which was truly fucking rich, like she and Kady Orloff-Diaz didn’t go to the woods every day after class and fuck around with battle magic _—_ hated them both equally at her evident exhaustion at needing to fix Quentin’s mess yet again, like in high school when she covered for him and covered for him as he could less and less force himself to get out of bed or do his work until one of his texts finally scared her enough that she went to his dad and attempt #1 had ended in failure, and he’d hated her so much, and once he was in a medicated upswing he still hated her and loved her desperately because she’d saved his life and because she was Julia, and hated himself as she sat in a chair beside his hospital bed after he’d had his stomach pumped, and she was so beautiful and so scared and Quentin was the most worthless person to ever live for being the cause of that haunted look in her eyes, and she’d never want him now because who ever could, and he’d hated himself even more for wanting any more than this, Julia’s brave jokes, her hand warm in his, how she’d said _fuck the doctors, fuck the nurses_ , and climbed into the bed with him, wrapped her tiny body around him, and how he’d started to cry into her hair as she clung to him. 

Now it was down to Julia to save him again, because he’ll die if he loses this, it hasn’t made him happy but he’ll die without it. Julia grabbed his hand and marched right to the Dean’s office and made a stirring argument that Quentin couldn’t quite follow through his terror, but he caught parts of a speech about how intellectual curiosity was to be properly guided, not stamped out, bits of a rant about how overly punitive institutions that thrive on fear are destined to fail at keeping anyone safe. It must have been persuasive enough to convince, or maybe the Dean’s blatant favoritism combined with his 3 o’clock cordial was enough to soften his heart, because with a sigh and a wave of his hand he said _fine_ , and condemned Quentin to the same probation as Alice. 

He fled from Julia, too. He managed to grind out a _thank you, Jules_ , knowing this is hateful, knowing he’s ungrateful. She said, _Q, c’mon, let’s—_ but he cut her off, said _I have to—we’ll talk later_ and stalked away, feeling sick as he thought about that moment when they were rushing across the Sea on the way to the Dean’s office, and Julia had turned to him and said in her most ardent voice, _If I can’t talk him out of it, if he expels you—I’ll find you, OK? I’ll fix it._

For just an instant—and he’ll hate himself for this for a long, long time _—_ he’d actually wondered _:_ if their positions were reversed, if Julia was expelled and magic wiped from her mind _—_ would he go after her? For a single second which he hopes will remain the clear MVP in his self-loathing rotation possibly forever, he wishes that Julia wasn’t at Brakebills. That he could remove her and thus remove this taunting mirror she’s turned into, this walking reflection of his inadequacy. 

Quentin sought out Alice again. She was forced to thank him and obviously hated every second. _I’m sorry, I didn’t want you to get expelled, I just—I have to figure out what happened to Charlie_. This cold-bloodedness, the doomed inescapability of Alice’s self-appointed task, held great appeal for Quentin. This was someone who had known real suffering; someone whose life has been touched by true loss: but Charlie wasn’t the type to just give up, Alice assures him at Wolf Fountain, and Alice isn’t either.

That was why Quentin couldn’t just let her throw it all away, why he had to stop her from Niffining out. Maybe. Or maybe the true reason Quentin stopped Alice was envy. Here was someone who would annihilate themselves but only to great heartbreaking purpose, because it was what duty and love required. No morose scrawlings on a torn out sheet of notebook paper for her father to find, nothing to find at all as she immolates herself in a blaze of pure furious light. Part of him thought that in some sick way he was jealous of that clarity. 

Alice Quinn was still alive, but gone, and gone hating him. Then she was back and she didn’t hate him anymore. They were on a roof together naked in the autumn chill. Quentin has been asked to solve the riddle of himself but he can’t. He has almost everything and he is still unhappy because he is still himself. Quentin thought of Julia that past summer, after he got out of the hospital, and she knew without him having told her, and he knew she knew, and she knew he knew she knew. Julia told him life was beginning, real life. There were no doors to escape through. This was it.

But there had been a door, a door in a hedge to magic. And still Julia was right. There’s no door for Quentin out of himself, out of this mind and this body. This is what he tells Alice on the roof, and it’s profundity, it’s truth, is sealed by the ropes falling away from his wrists. 

He then transformed into a fucking goose and took to the sky. 

Antarctica sucked. Turning into a bird and flying the breadth of the Earth to the icy center of the world _blew_. Quentin didn’t even get relief from his brain while he was a goose. Like, he was a goose, not exactly himself, but he was an incredibly anxious goose. Then he was himself again, freezing all the time and in pajamas that are somehow both ill-fitting and uncomfortably revealing at the same time and having his masculinity and magic ability impugned by a cruel drunk Russian. 

Julia was there. Her gaze sought Quentin out worriedly and he avoided it, but she was quickly preoccupied with some pantomimed drama with Kady and Penny that he couldn’t track.

Alice was there and beautiful, softening towards him slightly in all that snow. All he had needed to do was tell her the very sexy history of all his hospitalizations. Who knew?

Quentin couldn’t quite follow the logic that had Mayakovsky transform them into foxes, but he was oddly grateful for it. He was an anxious goose and an anxious fox but it was a less entrenched anxiety, and washed away entirely when he got a whiff of Alice. At the beginning it wasn’t precisely sexual. Just animal. He smelled her and knew with certainty for one moment that he was not alone and could never be alone. They rolled over each other, pawing, sniffing, licking, biting, yipping in glee. The world was very cold and they were very warm and steam lifted off their fur into the air. Then it shifted: but naturally, without thought. He was a fox and he was having sex as a fox but it felt normal, unremarkable, the only thing to do. 

Human again, but not yet condemned. Quentin had a body and it wanted and it was fine. The world didn’t end. The smell of Alice and fox told him what he already knew. Told his hunger back to him. There was no fumbling, no nerves, the faithful companion that his fear of loss always made was turned faithless after all. He bit Alice hard, on the back of the neck, in his joy.

He felt shame later, when they got back to Brakebills. Because Alice was ashamed. _That wasn’t really us._

But it _was_ Quentin. It was Quentin laid bare, with all his obstructing neuroses pared away. Quentin as he had always felt himself to be, since the first time Julia had walked toward him one day, innocent and happy to see him, and suddenly and quite against his will all he could see were her breasts: oversexed, horny, embarrassing, desperate, pathetic, too much, _oozing_ with his feelings, sliming everything up with his desire. He’d had to fight so hard to keep it off Julia, even though his failure had always been evident, because she _knew_ —and now Alice knew too. Inhibition had been stripped from Quentin and their fevered entanglements on his cot returned in flashes to torment him. Her smell, her heat. He’d mounted her from behind and taken the nape of her neck in his teeth but she’d met him at every turn. Thrown him on the bed and ridden him. Torn his back up with her nails. 

Now it shamed her and shamed him and he attempted to mask the scent of fox with cologne and presented himself as harmless. It worked. He didn’t go wild in the library and fuck her on the books or anything. Like, Jesus, what did she think of him? He can control himself.

The next night he couldn’t. Quentin kissed Alice in the hallway and she kissed him back and then they were in her room. His hands were shaking too hard to undo the buttons on her blouse. He had to make this good so she’d want to do it again. She was so beautiful and already sighing in exasperation at his fumbling, gently batting his hands away, and Quentin thought with bleak humor, _shit, that’s a new record_ , but she was just taking over the shirt removal process. 

When Alice’s shirt was off and she stood before Quentin in her bra, they froze. Alice looked back up with him with something almost like panic in her eyes. He had to do something. Guys did something here. In Antarctica in the aftershocks of pure instinct he would have pushed her down on the bed, put his cock in her. His body had known exactly what to do. He reached out his hand and touched her shoulder where a purple mark from Quentin’s mouth was fading to an ugly yellow. 

They’d managed somehow. Quentin’s hands sweated and he bit Alice’s lip on accident. Quentin on his knees in front of her, nosing at her underwear, blue with pink hearts. Alice had said, _Oh, you don’t have—are you—do you want to?_ She sounded so bewildered Quentin felt a pang of embarrassment about how badly he did want it. He’d never wanted anything so much in his life. When he first touched his tongue to her she’d given a little gasp and her hand flew out to tug at his hair and Quentin had moaned so loud that they’d both frozen again. His face hot, Alice hotter against him. It’d been a moment before he could start up again. Quentin was inside her and she was tight and perfect around him, her breasts felt so incredible against him, and she was making these tiny bitten-off sighs, and he couldn’t stop saying _God, you’re so beautiful_ , and Alice's face twisted every time. 

So that was how Quentin finally got a girlfriend. Fuck as foxes, go steady. 

Quentin was so happy walking across campus the next morning with Alice’s hand in his, but he dropped it like it burnt when they ran into Julia in front of the library. Alice looked hurt and Quentin was instantly sorry and tried to interlace their fingers again but then it was Alice’s turn to yank her hand away as if stung by his touch. 

He couldn’t have explained to Alice why he’d done it. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of her, as she’ll accuse later that evening. It was that he was proud, and being seen by Julia confronted with his feeling of satisfaction at being perceived as a part of a unit with a girl like Alice.

Julia was happy for him. She said so, and he could see it was true, and it hurt. The palpable weight of her relief. Quentin was finally someone else’s problem. 

Quentin began having weird dreams. Well, that was normal. Weird _sex_ dreams. Also pretty normal. But it felt wrong and unjust to continue to have these bizarre dreams when he was sleeping in a bed with his incredibly hot girlfriend. 

Like the one where he was Indiana Jones and Julia was Leia Organa and Alice was Daenerys Targaryen and—okay, that one wasn’t weird. Actually, you know, very pleasant. But then came the one where Quentin was Martin Chatwin but also himself, and Julia was Jane Chatwin but also herself. That part was typical. Fillory was still his most common recurring dream theme. More unexpected was Eliot Waugh as Rupert Chatwin but also himself. In a tweed jacket, debonair and handsome, every inch a dashing war hero, in total command of himself, he’d walked right up to his sister/Julia with his dignified, courtly limp and kissed her passionately with tongue while sticking his hand up her schoolgirl skirt as she giggled.

Quentin practically willed himself out of the dream. Sat up in bed gasping like people did in movies. 

That was just _so wrong_ , on so many levels. Eliot was his friend, and although sex dreams about Julia were normal if shameful _incest sex dreams_ about their childhood idols were certainly not. Also, like, Rupert was gay? There had always been rumors about him and his American army buddy Lance Morrison but then in 2005 their private correspondence had been released and it had been put beyond all shadow of a doubt and Quentin had written a paper on it and everything.

It didn’t last. 

Alice broke up with him six weeks and three days after the first time they slept together at Brakebills South. He’ll go back over every moment later and every good part (Alice blinking at him in an endearingly owlish way when he took off her glasses; the way the blunt ends of her hair brushed the elegant slope of her shoulders when she looked down; the sight of her soft stomach with it’s gentle fold of skin above the waistband of her underwear and how it staggered him with tenderness; standing in the corner of a party with her; how her magic possessed a sense of barely contained force, of terrible natural processes like avalanches, rogue waves, plate tectonics) was subsumed into an unbearable accounting of all his failures (Alice saying _Quentin I don’t want to talk about it_ after he said something that made her mouth go tight and he desperately sought to understand why; the anxious way his eyes tracked her when they were in a room together like she might vanish in a twist of smoke, the weight of Quentin’s gaze making the muscles of her neck twitch like a horse flicking off a fly; the sight of her pinched brow as Quentin moved his fingers clumsily in her and tried to make that line ease, her mouth go slack in a mirror of his want and how helpless he felt when he failed; kissing her in public only for her whole body to go rigid; how—)

_I just don’t think we’re right for each other._

_I think we rushed into things._

_I don't know who I am or what I’m doing and I just can’t be anyone’s girlfriend right now._

_I don’t think we’re—I mean, for you, is it—do you. Sexually. Do you think we’re sexually compatible?_

_I want us to be friends. You were my first real friend. You reminded me of—I do want us to be friends, Quentin. Please._

The last was the worst. Which is really saying something, since in the same conversation his first sexual partner of any duration longer than a week had just told him he was terrible in bed. Her offer of friendship was the worst because it was the best, because it was kindness but a kindness that wounded simply because it was not what he wanted. He didn’t want kindness, he wanted _—_

Quentin wanted not to cry in front of her. 

He didn’t get that wish granted either. 

It was Alice’s turn to flee from him this time. She shoved her books in her bag hastily _—_ she broke up with him in the _library_ —but then she stopped and said _Q_ , softly, just once, and then walked away on quiet feet after she watched Quentin’s entire body flinch in reaction. 

Of course with his luck he ran into Julia on his way out of the library. Quentin was burning with humiliation. There was some defect in him that drove away anyone who came close. Here was Julia, who could have anything she wanted, who drew people to her like a moth to flame and who was also good and so continued to tolerate Quentin out of a sense of loyalty. He hadn’t managed to lose her yet, but it would come. So many things that could rip them apart and nothing in Quentin’s power to seal her to him as indissolubly as he longed for. Images flashed before his eyes, absurd and tortuous at once: Julia's supreme self-command earning Quentin’s place at her side in the face of the disapproval of her gaggle of acolytes freshman year when she overnight became both hot and popular; Julia getting her license (Quentin failed three times before giving up for good) and driving him everywhere in the very expensive car she got for her sixteenth birthday; James’ arm proprietary around Julia’s shoulder, her waist, reaching with his other hand to tousle Quentin’s hair like he was an amusing pet; insomniac reading in the glass-doored den that had been converted into an extra bedroom for Quentin to live in and hearing Julia and James stumble in trashed and attempting not to hear Julia’s moans as they fucked on the couch. 

Julia knew him. She knew by his face that something terrible had happened to him. 

Quentin felt wild, as he laughed out, _yeah, so Alice broke up with me._

_Oh, Q, shit, I’m so sorry._

_Yeah, I just bet you are._

Nasty enough that she went very still and asked him what exactly that was supposed to mean.

It finally exploded, all of Quentin’s poison. _Obviously_ Julia would be devastated that she had to deal with him again. She must have been so _relieved_ to finally have to stop playing dumb when it came to Quentin.

_What the fuck are you talking about?_

_You knew. You’ve always known._

Quentin didn’t know exactly what he was expecting there, but obviously Julia came back swinging.

_Are you for fucking real? Maladjusted little boy bullshit. Classy, Q, really nice. Get the fuck over yourself._

Then Julia’s eyes filled with tears. _You’re so fucking selfish, Quentin. Really? You haven't asked me about Kady. Not once. You didn’t even fucking notice._

_What the fuck does your hedge thief friend have to do with anything?_

Quentin was honestly thrown. Wait, Kady? What? It _was_ the scandal of the school year: she’d bailed after Brakebills South because apparently she’d been stealing shit since the beginning of fall term for some expelled former student who had gotten someone killed a few years back. Quentin had _too_ asked, figuring Julia knew what the hell had really gone down there, but Julia had been weirdly cagey about it all. 

Julia made a strangled scream-laugh of sheer frustration, and ground her hands into her eyes. Quentin’s mouth kept running. _Literally, what? Okay, so now you can fuck her boyfriend—_ that’s what had been up with their drama at Brakebills South, right?

Then Julia hauled back her hand and smacked him.

 _Did you—did you just fucking hit me?_ Quentin said as Julia stalked off.

_Jules, wait—_


	3. march 9 & march 24, 2016

Shortly after the one-two punch of Alice breaking up with Quentin and Quentin turning around and imploding his oldest friendship, Quentin has two significant conversations.

The first begins at the end of his trek across campus in the mockingly permabeautiful weather of Brakebills, hoping to make it to his room without running into anybody so he can throw himself face down on his bed and scream in peace. But his luck continues to run out: “Quentin!” 

They’re in the garden in the back of the cottage. Quentin had almost made it, but Eliot Waugh is calling his name. 

Eliot comes towards him with his graceful, relaxed gait. He’s smiling like always, as if he finds running into Quentin a delightful occurrence. The smile slowly fades and one of Eliot’s eyebrows arches, sardonic and sympathetic at once, when he catches sight of the expression on Quentin’s face. 

“Oh, dear. That bad?” 

Quentin’s throat feels clogged. There’s some sort of blockage in it preventing speech, and so it all leaks out of the undefended gateway of his eyes instead. God, he hates how easily he cries. It’s pathetic, and it’s always made him an easy target. _Crybaby_ in elementary school. _Pussy_ and _little bitch_ and an exciting buffet of homophobic slurs once he hit middle-school.

There’s a moment of miserable silence where Quentin’s own feet begin to blur in front of his eyes before Eliot answers himself: “Pretty bad.” He puts his big hand on Quentin’s shoulder and begins to steer him back towards the cottage. “Let’s get some alcohol in you, shall we?” 

God, yes. That’s exactly what he needs, to get so drunk it obliterates the last 24 hours entirely. Maybe the last year. The level of drunkenness necessary may not exist this side of killing him. _Well, I wouldn’t say no to that either_. The thought that to another person might be the sign of an alarming shift in mental state is Quentin’s baseline and it takes form in his mind smoothly. He’s nodding his assent to at least temporary annihilation of self so fervently that Eliot laughs, low and warm. 

The common room is empty. This is no surprise as in his headlong rush across campus Quentin had perceived that seemingly everyone was out of doors; he had been taunted by the sight of groups of friends lounging on blankets in the grass, of lovers entwined. Brakebills never exactly got cold over the winter due to whatever magic keeps the campus’ climate temperate, and yet someone has designed things so there is still a noticeable spring: a relief, an unfurling.

Quentin sits down heavily on the couch. It’s a position he has found himself in innumerable times in the last seven months but now he looks around himself feeling confused, every familiar shape turned strange. Light falls honeyed through the thick old glass in the windows, gilding the wood of the bookcases and tables with a warmth that makes them seem animal and alive. Curious delightful touches meet the eye everywhere one looks: the multicolored glass of Eliot’s liquor shelf refracting rainbows onto that living wood; the natty emerald velvet on a chair; an astrolabe beside someone’s abandoned astronomy homework; a skull bedecked in a feather boa that tells dirty riddles; beer bottles and even a chair stuck to the ceiling from long-forgotten telekinetic feats. A cabinet of wonders that Quentin has felt continual awe to be admitted to now made nearly unrecognizable. Had he and Alice really been curled up together on that window seat a few nights ago? How could he have ever thought to belong here?

Cool glass is pressed into Quentin’s palm, and Quentin looks up at Eliot standing before him, entirely at home in this place. It’s evident he had also been enjoying the tempting weather before Quentin came along. It’s odd to see him in something other than vest and ties in garnet and plum and charcoal but in an effortless adaptation to the general atmosphere he’s donned shorts and a polo shirt in pinks and creams. There’s a smoky smell to his skin. 

“God, sorry,” Quentin says, taking a swallow of the drink he’s been given so quick and big that in a certain insult to Eliot’s dedicated craftsmanship he hardly tastes it. “I didn’t mean to take you away from—whatever, were you and Margo grilling out, or—” 

“Psh.” Eliot waves this away airily. “Margo traitorously abandoned me, and obviously we were waiting for you to show up anyway.”

Well, Quentin had shown up, alright. Now he’s recalling the vague plans made the night before, the kind of plans that are in fact the absence of any: to grill out and drink and enjoy doing nothing much at all this evening. It’s as magical as anything else about this place, that Quentin often has people, plural, _obviously_ waiting for him. But here arrives the natural end result of such magnanimity on Eliot’s part—an open invitation extended to Quentin is also an invitation for all his morose bullshit.

“Q,” Eliot breaks into the stream of his thoughts gently as he sits down beside Quentin on the sofa. “Obviously I am not one to force a man to bare his soul before drinking away his sorrows or anything, but just so we’re clear—no one’s hurt or anything, right?”

Quentin shakes his head before Eliot can even finish, sorry to have made him feel real worry. 

“The apocalypse isn’t nigh? Tolkien didn’t die, did he?” 

Quentin knows Eliot wants him to retort that Eliot _knows_ that it isn’t fucking Tall-Ken and also Tall-Ken’s been dead since 1973, and it startles a sound out of him, not really a laugh but maybe the laugh’s bastard love child with a sob. Eliot smiles at Quentin like he’s proud of himself, eyes crinkling at the corners. Quentin drags a hand down his own face. 

“No, everything’s—no one’s dead. God, sorry.”

This last causes Eliot to knock his shoulder against Quentin’s in mild reprimand, and it takes everything in Quentin not to apologize for apologizing, something that drives _everybody_ nuts. There’s pressure building behind his eyes. His chest hurts. To try to see if he can let Eliot distract himself for a few more minutes from the oncoming storm of shame and panic, Quentin says bleakly: “That bad, huh?” 

“Pretty bad,” Eliot agrees. 

His shoulder is warm against Quentin’s own. Quentin looks at him out of the corner of his eye, observing the poise with which he sits, the elegance of his long throat when he swallows. Eliot is his friend, who Quentin drinks with and who helps Quentin with his homework and who makes elaborate dinners for no one in particular but which Quentin and Margo are always at hand to consume, and yet that first impression of wonder has never quite faded. Eliot is always tied in with magic in his mind. They belong to each other, somehow, in a way Quentin will never belong. A fresh rush of tears prickles at Quentin’s eyes. Quentin will probably end up spilling the entire horrid saga to Eliot sometime in the course of the evening. That has a way of happening with Eliot, and it doesn’t feel quite fair: that he’s so sophisticated and yet bizarrely Quentin finds himself so comfortable with him that from the first Quentin has never been able to make even a token attempt to restrain himself.

Still, he’d like to put off weeping on Eliot’s well-tailored shoulder for as long as possible. “What happened to Margo?” he asks after a pause. 

Eliot picks up Quentin’s robotic-toned attempt at distraction smoothly and runs with it. He sighs theatrically. “Oh, well, Dr. Morante showed up, quite out of the blue—apparently she does this _famous, how have you never heard of this, El, do you even listen to me when I talk_ , internship at her ancestral villa in Lombardy. Not every summer, it seems there’s no schedule other than the good professoressa’s whim. Turns out 2016 is one of the lucky years and our little cryomancer wants in.”

“Oh, Margo wants—Morante is weather magic, right?” 

“See? You keep listening to Margo’s magic nerdery so I don’t have to. I was in fact aware of Morante—she visited campus last year, and I knew Margo wanted Morante to be her mommy but I failed to appreciate what is apparently also a _deep academic admiration, Eliot_. Not that it’s either/or, Margo can multitask. Which she’s looking to do. Morante wanted to talk to her, so fingers crossed it all works out.”

“Uh,” Quentin says. He’s caught on _mommy_. He knows better to invite humiliation by asking for clarification of the terms here. He can figure it out. Context clues. Having met Margo. “So Margo might be going to Italy this summer?”

That sounds so oddly mundane to his own ears that Quentin had to smile. He turns to look at Eliot and finds Eliot not staring off into the middle distance in worldly-wise contemplation of European sexual intrigue like he’d expected, but looking at Quentin with a small smile. Mission objectives for Operation Distract Quentin from Contemplating the Abyss _achieved_. There’s that molten lump in Quentin’s chest again. He looks away. 

Eliot clears his throat and takes Quentin’s drink and goes to the bar to prepare a refill. 

“Yes, sadly we might be left to each other’s company in our own continental jaunts. Morante only takes the best, and I certainly don’t qualify. Weather magic is _not_ my forte. And Margo has no compunctions about abandoning me.”

Eliot sounds wistful about it. Good-humored but also perhaps genuinely hurt. It’s hard to imagine Eliot and Margo separated. Of course he’d be depressed at the prospect of being left with only Quentin as a companion on their vaguely sketched out trip to Europe this summer. This summer…

“Maybe there’s a, I don’t know, telekinetic internship at a chateau in Switzerland, or something,” Quentin responds lamely. Worth a shot, if Eliot’s faith in his magical prowess is the thing to be assuaged. “Since these are apparently things that happen. I thought mentor’s weekend covered everything?” 

“Oh, no, that’s small fry,” Eliot scoffs, engaging in some interesting revisionist history considering he and Margo’s jointly deranged state back in October. “The real deal are the freaks who wouldn’t deign to engage in that kind of hobnobbing.”

Eliot returns to the sofa, presenting Quentin’s drink with a flourish, and continues: “That’s sweet of you to say, Q, but I have absolutely zero interest in anything remotely ambitious this summer. We’ll have much more fun being wastrels, and maybe Margo can join us for the odd weekend…”

He trails off at the look on Quentin’s face. It’s finally hitting him. This summer: the recurrent torment of having a future. Eliot and Margo weren’t the only people he’d made plans with. Alice, who had never been to the beach. Julia, who had a list of magical sights to visit as long as her arm. Oh, fuck, _Julia_.

“Q,” Eliot says, and there’s a thread of alarm in his voice that makes Quentin realize he’s possibly hyperventilating slightly. Eliot quickly takes Quentin’s drink back and sets it safely on the coffee table before kneeling in front of him. “Q, hey, breathe.” 

This is a response that always makes Quentin feel like screaming. If he could breathe obviously he’d be doing it, no one chooses _not_ to breathe except for, okay, yes, those times Quentin had made that choice. Eliot’s hands are warm on his knees. Quentin can’t meet Eliot’s eyes so he moans, “I fucked up, I really fucked up,” into his cupped palms. 

Eliot says: “Yeah?” Not: _I’m sure that’s not true_. Somehow that makes Quentin feel slightly better, like Eliot is open, a vessel into which he can pour his failure, redistribute to keep it from overflowing. “What happened?”

Where to even fucking begin? 

“Alice broke up with me.”

“Sounds like she fucked up, then.” Eliot responds immediately, and Quentin gives a hysterical, hiccuping laugh and shakes his head emphatically. “Well, why’d she do it then?”

This is stated so baldly, with such frank curioristy, that Quentin has to lower his hands from his face and look at Eliot, irate. Eliot shrugs, only slightly abashed. 

“Sorry. Incurable gossip, you should know this by now. I only mean that I can’t imagine you did anything _wrong_. I’m baffled at Alice’s poor taste. In cocktails, yes, but when it came to men I had good reason to think better of her.” 

Eliot was a good friend. He flirted with everyone, and didn’t begrudge Quentin some of the warmth of that attention. Quentin had been worried at first that it was some kind of bit, one of the many inscrutable jokes that he and Margo shared. Months on, though, and this didn’t seem to be the case. Quentin had sometimes felt angry and condescended to at the idea that Eliot was trying to, like, raise Quentin’s confidence or something—but no, for some reason Eliot appeared to be genuine in his conviction that Quentin was desirable. 

Of course Eliot has hit on the real sting here. Quentin hadn’t _done_ anything wrong; Quentin _was_ wrong. 

“Alice—she said it wasn’t working? She was kind of vague on the details, but then she doesn’t have to be precise, it’s obvious, right, she’s— _her_ , and I’m _me_ , and I can never—I can never keep anything that I— ” 

“Quentin, it’s not obvious at all,” Eliot insists. 

That’s nice. Of course Eliot would say that. It makes Quentin even more ashamed. Luckily Eliot isn’t done.

“Alice seems like…she has a lot of her own stuff going on. And she’s not shy about letting people know when they’ve displeased her. If she said it wasn’t working, that’s probably exactly what she meant. I never thought you two…”

“Yeah, it was a real mismatch. Everyone probably wondered how someone like me ever got with someone like her, and now the entire school will be like well, of course _that_ experiment ended quickly.”

Eliot looks honestly taken aback. “That’s not what I meant. It _always_ made sense to me that—I was just trying to say that I didn’t see how you two could last when she was always such a bitch to you.”

Quentin startles. Eliot looks equally surprised. 

“Jesus, sorry,” Eliot says. “I didn’t mean it to come out that way. I like Alice, truly. But as I said, it seems like she had a lot going on, and—”

“And I annoyed the shit out of her, yeah,” Quentin says. “It is like you said. She wasn’t shy about it.”

Because Quentin had, he knew he had. He’d tried so hard to get that treasured heartbreaking smile from Alice but success was so rare. Instead all he seemed to do was leave her exasperated and irritated without ever being sure what he had done. Be himself, he supposes. 

“Okay, no, I take back my take back,” Eliot pronounces. “Friend duty calls. She was a total bitch to you and good riddance.”

Quentin’s laugh is a rather wet, limp thing. Eliot is always so nice. Because he doesn’t _know_. He doesn’t know what Quentin’s really done, what he’s destroyed. Quentin is going to tell him, though. He can feel it bubbling up inside himself. It’s better that he knows now. 

“No, she was right. Alice was right, because Julia, I—” Quentin’s throat closes up entirely. Alice had known, somehow, the poison that Quentin tried to keep hidden. She’d seen it and then Quentin had gone and proven her a prophet by being the worst person imaginable. 

“Julia?” Eliot says, confused. “I admit I’m a bit lost, but I’ll call her a bitch too if that’s what you need. And I _really_ like Julia.”

“I think you just like women that—could maybe be described that way. So I don’t know if that actually…” Quentin is distracted by Eliot for a moment, Eliot smiling at him and his hands like hot stones where they still rest on Quentin’s knees. But Quentin’s also shaking his head even as he speaks. “No, no. I ran into Julia in the library, after Alice—and—fuck, I exploded at her like a lunatic. I ruined everything. She’s never going to fucking speak to me again. She _shouldn’t_ ever speak to me again.” 

“I think I’m missing some necessary context here, Q,” Eliot says. He must have determined that Quentin’s hand is now steady enough to be worthy of his creation because he passes the drink back to Quentin and moves to once again sit beside him on the sofa. “But I can’t imagine anything that would make _Julia_ never speak to you again.” 

The thought that anything about his feelings for Julia needs to be explained is an odd one. Quentin has always felt that it must be painfully, humiliatingly obvious. 

“I’ve been in love with Julia since I was twelve.” It makes Quentin feel nauseous to say. He doesn’t think he’s ever stated it out loud before. As soon as it’s said, it doesn’t seem right, somehow. 

“Ah,” Eliot says. 

“Wasn’t it obvious?” Quentin replies bitterly. 

“I know you’ve been best friends since elementary school.” There’s something almost pensive in Eliot’s tone. 

“Yeah, and then puberty hit and I got feelings and she didn’t. I knew she didn’t feel that way about me. So I always—I fought so hard to not let it show, not to let her know. She did anyway, obviously. I’ve never been exactly _subtle_. But I never said anything. I knew it wasn’t fair to her but I couldn’t stop how I felt, I couldn’t stop wanting her. She’s _Julia_. She’s everything. But if someone is your friend, really your friend, and they aren’t interested in you, you don’t ruin it by forcing all your stupid feelings on them. I was the worst, but I still knew that wasn’t right.”

“Yeah,” Eliot agrees softly. 

“She dated all these awful dudes in high school, and I hated them and I resented her and I hated myself because, god, she was my _best friend_ , and I was mad at her because she wouldn’t let me—then she started dating James, who wasn’t awful at all, he was everything I wasn’t, he was handsome and kind and confident and _sane_ —” 

“Q…”

“And she was so relieved when I started dating Alice. I resented that. Because I knew it was because me and my feelings were finally someone else’s problem. But also she was happy for me, she’s always wanted me to be happy.”

Quentin’s voice cracks, he hates it, he hates this, but he can’t seem to stop.

“Then I ran into her and she told me she was sorry and I knew she meant it and I finally—after so many years of holding it in I vomited all my shitty feelings all over her and of course she was horrified, and I’ve been the _worst_ friend, I hadn’t noticed anything that was going on with her—like, with Kady?—” at this Eliot nods like yeah, of course, Julia and Kady, that whole deal, duh, okay, wow, just great, “and I was fucking awful, I lashed at out and— ”

“Quentin,” Eliot cuts in. “It sounds like you fucked up.”

Quentin nods in miserable agreement and swallows the rest of his drink in one gulp. Eliot hands his own drink to Quentin and Quentin puts his mouth gratefully on glass warmed by Eliot’s lip and shudders as he drinks that down too.

“But you’ve been friends with Julia for what, nearly two decades? No matter how much of a bitch you were—and hey, you’re right, I am very fond of bitches, so I don’t doubt you have it in you—it can be fixed.”

Quentin makes a noise of open derision and Eliot sighs. “Yeah, I find that hard to believe too. Usually. This time I’m actually being sincere. Come on, Q. You’ll apologize and she’ll forgive you.”

There’s still something false in Eliot’s voice despite his protestation of belief. Quentin’s laugh is despairing. He rolls his neck against the back of the couch, eyes burning. Turns towards Eliot to see if his face offers any greater assurance. It does and it doesn’t—it’s just Eliot’s face. Eyes sympathetic, mouth wry. “I know. I’m not good at this. Let’s not talk, OK?”

So they don’t, at least for a while. Dark comes on, and a few people start to trickle into the cottage, although most stay out in the balmy evening. Alice isn’t among them, nor is Margo. Eliot and Quentin relocate to a window seat. 

Hours later. Lights bobbing across the grass, sparking across the window pane. 

“Julia wasn’t my only crush. Well, crush isn’t exactly the right word for her. But I had all these humiliating _crushes_ too, on top of that.”

Quentin is performing a bit. Making this unbearable thing bearable by really leaning in to it. Worth a shot. It’s obvious why tonight of all nights these spectral taunting girls shimmer before him, crawl up out of his mouth. 

“Ooh, what were baby Q’s crushes like?” For some reason this seems to amuse Eliot to no end. 

“There was Addison from junior cowboy camp. She was a, like, horse whisperer. A horse girl. Obsessed. I was scared out of my mind by the horses, at least at first. I don’t think they liked me much. The horses.”

Addison of the two glossy cornsilk plaits and the heartstopping smattering of freckles, shod in boots of gleaming pungent leather, hand darting out with the astonishing quickness of instinct to catch the reins of Quentin’s horse when Rocky—the slowest and gentlest one in the stable, possessed of a tired looking spine and an undulating, plodding gait—had proven so resistant to letting Quentin ride him that he’d uncharacteristically bolted. “They can sense your fear, you know,” Addison had scolded, returning the horse to Quentin. “You can’t let them know you’re frightened of them,” she’d insisted, her pity turning to scorn when he’d panicked and tried to give the horse back. In Quentin’s memory she’d then flicked one of those perfect silken twists of hair over her shoulder and nimbly leapt into the saddle of a beautiful gray horse and galloped her and her freckles and her boots away.

They’re both laughing so hard Quentin can’t speak for a moment, and someone from the wider common room says _good lord_. Eliot lazily gives them the finger. 

“Then there was Sofia, freshman year? No, sophomore year. She was a freshman.” 

Sofia from his geometry class, freshman wunderkind on the varsity swim team the year they went to state, sleek and compact and as comfortable in her element as a seal, with thick dark hair on her arms that Quentin found oddly beautiful and that he felt hot all over when he imagined getting to stroke it which he always did as he watched her raise her arm to work out a proof to perfection at the whiteboard in third period, obscurely shamed and trying to think of something fucking normal, like her small breasts in her wet suit but again there were her arms with their ropey muscles flexing as she hauled herself out of the pool at a meet which he and Julia attended purportedly because she and Sofia were friends but Quentin suspected was because of Julia’s infatuation with Joey Lamb on the boy’s team. 

“College, that was rough.”

Miriam from his Intro to Women’s Studies class, from his Existentialist Metaphysics class, from his seminar on Tolstoy, Quentin haunting her from building to building and department to department quite accidentally. Another head of long dark hair. Spiky all over. Her black tights with their perpetual runs and her scuffed ankle boots, dark purple polish on her nails, rings on every finger, a mysterious black-and-red tattoo climbing up her collarbone to peak out from the collar of her shirt and he wanted to lick it to its origins. She’d read everything, a breadth of knowledge that made Quentin want to crawl under his desk every day: obscure female modernists and hidden fantasy gems and out-of-print bargain bin paperback memoirs of forgotten Golden Hollywood starlets and a collection of noir pulps. She’d lived in Senegal and Latvia. She thought Quentin’s taste in books were infantile and all his opinions were stupid. He had confusing dreams of eating her out while she read Goethe in the original German. 

Eliot doesn’t ask if he ever made a move on any of them, doesn’t censure him with his lack of reasonable cause to complain. Doesn’t urge Quentin to confess the parallel stories of all the times he _did_ succeed with a girl (not—you know, not many, but yeah, it’s happened) because that’s not the point. They don’t leach the sting from these wounds. They’re an entirely separate story. 

“Come on, now, you’ve gotta—you have to like, comfort me.” Quentin’s words are beginning to come out funny. “Right? I mean, you’re _you_ , but I have to believe you at least have one embarrassing crush. Like, maybe in high school, maybe for just a minute there...”

A strange look passes over Eliot’s face, but it might be a trick of the falling light. “Oh, sure. Many. High school though...”

He’s quiet for a long moment. Quentin nudges his thigh with his foot, and Eliot smiles at him. He starts out with his typical jocular, expansive storytelling tone. The eloquent rise and fall of his wrist as he pushes his hair back. His languid sigh. “Kyle. You know the story. I was a theater kid and he worked the lights as extra credit for the class of Mrs. Carlsson’s he was failing. He was failing _music appreciation class_. Baseball star, prom king, etc. Very wholesome and widely beloved, but he was actually nice to—” 

Eliot cuts himself off. Gives a little shrug. 

“I don’t actually know that story,” Quentin says nonsensically, sleepy before one last rally. 

Days have passed, maybe. 

“It’s just, like, obviously, right? Alice realizes, ha, Quentin Coldwater, what? I’ve never—she said she wanted to be friends! Friends. I’ve got enough of those. I’ve got so many of those. Now. Or I did. Got some friends, lost some friends. Haha. Friends, friends, friends. Everyone wants to be my friend.”

“No no no.” At least Eliot’s voice is slurring too. Not as much as Quentin’s, but still. “Someday—no, listen to me. Someday someone is gonna want to not be friends with you so bad, Q.”

This strikes Quentin as deeply hilarious. Eliot’s face is very close to his. 

“I’m serious. I’m so serious.”

Quentin can’t stop laughing. “It’s new for me, people wanting to be my friend. I was always such a loser. Only Julia ever wanted to be my friend.”

That makes him stop laughing very abruptly, like someone turning a radio off. He’s filled with deep sadness. God, what has he done? 

“But now you. You, and Margo. Like I can’t believe it,” Quentin says, looking at Eliot. His eyelashes dark against his cheek. “You. I couldn’t believe you wanted to be my friend. That you’re my friend. You’re so…”

Handsome Eliot. Tall Eliot. Kind, funny, stylish Eliot. “You’re magical.”

Eliot laughs, and Quentin feels the heat of embarrassment laid on top of the alcohol flush, but he’s too drunk to care much. His regrets in the morning are going to be infinite. “You’re—stop laughing, you _are_. You _belong_ here. I don’t belong here. I’ve never belonged anywhere. I keep thinking someone’s made a mistake, and they’re going to realize, and I’m going to wake up and this will all be gone.” 

“That’s how you know,” Eliot says with drunken confidence. Fuck, they are _so drunk_. 

“What?” Quentin’s lost. His eyes feel heavy.

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Eliot leans in even closer. Wine on his breath hot against Quentin’s face. “Me neither. No one who belongs anywhere belongs here. That’s how you know you’re a magician.” 

For one moment everything makes perfect sense to Quentin. 

*

Quentin Coldwater sits on the edge of Margo’s bed. Hunched over in his dumb little hoodie. Margo had considered digging out a bottle of wine and pouring him a glass, trying to get him to loosen up a bit. But no. Better to not get any substances involved.

Margo stands before him. Takes him in, thinking. Plans her course of action. This requires delicacy.

It makes Quentin nervous. He squirms, and then bursts out, “Why are you doing this?” 

“Doing what?” Margo asks innocently. She knows what Quentin means, but she wants to see if he’ll say it. He can’t. She thinks he tries, he opens and closes his mouth a couple of times, flushes, but he can’t quite get it out. _Why are you about to have sex with me?_ Margo sighs. “Because I want to.”

“ _Why_?” Quentin says, totally bewildered. Which makes Margo both sad, and annoyed. She rolls her eyes heavenward, but Quentin doesn’t even notice. “You aren’t, like. _Into me._ ”

For fuck’s sake. How old were they? She understands what Quentin is getting at. Margo had been crystal-clear: this was a friends-with-benefits situation. They’d screw and it would be fun, but Margo has absolutely no intention of dating him, and would never develop this intention. The second she thought Quentin was harboring hopes that might change, she was cutting this shit off. Margo hopes that doesn’t happen, and thinks she’s reasonable to believe it probably won’t. She thinks that despite appearances, this might be exactly what Quentin needs.

“Define ‘ _into_.’”

Ok, yeah. Too much for tonight. Quentin looks like his head is about to explode. Margo sighs again. That’s happening far too much already, but she has no one to blame but herself. She knew what she was signing up for. “Q, I’m _into_ having sex with you tonight. That’s all it takes. This is where I want to be and that’s what matters. Do _you_ want to have sex with _me_?” 

The baldness of this statement causes Quentin to make a weird gurgling sound. “Um. Yeah. That’s why I’m here.”

Margo claps her hands together, which makes Quentin flinch slightly. Like a scared puppy, no loud noises. She wishes Eliot hadn’t decided to be a weirdo. This is a place where they would have made an excellent team. “Great. You want to learn how to get a girl off, yes?”

Quentin still looks nervous. Margo doesn’t think that will go away entirely, not tonight. But he nods, and although his answer is quiet, it’s given with more confidence: “Yes.” 

“Good. That’s why. I’m a feminist, and I would be failing womankind if I released you on the world to fail to satisfy more women when I had the opportunity to stop it.”

Hm. Maybe a little meaner than she should go? Quentin doesn’t seem bothered. His brow wrinkles and he says, “Um, I don’t think that’s what femini—”

Margo puts a finger to his lips and says, “Shh. Please. Do not finish this sentence. Never let it be known you took exactly one women's studies course in college, not in the bedroom, or indeed anywhere.”

Quentin looks startled, like he’s barely refraining himself from asking how Margo knew. 

“Also,” Margo continues, “I’m your friend. It’s not your fault alone the sex was bad. Girls have a responsibility to know what they want and express it. I’d help Alice figure all that out but she’s firmly shut down all my attempts at friendliness.”

“You’d help…” another little squirm, this time more firmly in the nexus between arousal and nerves. Progress. But then, easily distracted, Quentin switches tracks. “You have a weird idea of friendship, Margo.”

Eh, true. But they’re getting off topic. “Anyone can be good at sex. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, but anyone can. It’s a true meritocracy.”

“It is?” Quentin sounds genuinely hopeful. That’s sweet, and again, sad. 

“Sure. It’s all about good first principles. Not about what bits or involved or what exactly they’re doing, but one essential thing.”

“Um. And that would be?”

“Figuring out what the other person wants, and trying to give it to them.” A bit didactic, but the simplicity is deceptive. 

“Oh. Okay.” Quentin obviously doesn’t get it.

“Did you ever ask Alice what she wanted you to do to her?” 

Quentin blinks at her. “I mean. I guess not exactly? But I’m not a _dick_. I asked her if, you know, it felt good.”

See, complicated. Even if Quentin had asked it seems unlikely that Alice would have had an answer. Too tightly wound to express it, and that’s if she’d figured it out in the first place. Margo has never seen two people who seemed as deeply uncomfortable with their possession of corporeal forms and all the complications they entail as Quentin and Alice. It’s a miracle they ever managed to fuck in the first place. Even Margo’s vivid and fearless imagination is daunted by trying to picture what it was actually like.

Margo moves to sit on the bed. A little behind Quentin, causing him to twist around, breaking his tense vigil on the edge of the bed, like he was ready to bolt at any moment. Margo smiles at him. Reaches out to tuck back the lock of hair that he’s hiding behind. “What did you guys do?”

Quentin huffs, annoyance masking a profound discomfort. “Is—is this really—god, Margo.”

“Another rule: to have good sex is you have to be able to talk about sex.” Quentin gives her a look like he wants to tell her that sounds moronic, but he keeps it to a look. _Sounds wrong; don’t know enough about sex to dispute it._ At least Quentin has some respect for obvious expertise. He’s slowly tilted downward, and now he’s lying mostly flat on the bed, head propped up on his hand. Classic sleepover gossip pose.

“The—all the normal stuff, I guess?”

Oh, honey. Margo raises an eyebrow at him, keeping her face unimpressed. 

“You know, we. We—I went down on her.” 

“Wow. Gold star.” 

Quentin rolls his eyes. “No—I just. Julia and her friends, they—a lot of times I think they forgot I was there, and they. Talked. And they always complained about guys who didn’t. And I...”

“Didn’t want to be complained about.” Interesting. Couldn’t eat Julia Wicker’s pussy, went forth into the wide world carrying the favor of her disappointments like a knight of old. Funny, and sad. 

“No. I mean yes, but—obviously I wanted—I wanted things to be good. For Alice.” 

“So you made a brave sacrifice...” 

Quentin flushes, fidgets. “No,” he says, low and rough. “It wasn’t a _sacrifice_. I wanted to. Alice was so. She was so—beautiful. I wanted to.” 

The first times Quentin’s desires have come up in this discussion. It makes Margo’s heart hurt a little. The actual problem isn’t what Quentin believes to be the problem, but Margo knows that sometimes it’s kinder to play along until you can help someone to realize the real problem for themselves. 

“But that wasn’t what Alice wanted.” Margo says this as gently as possible, but she swears she can feel the misery radiating off Quentin’s body start to vibrate at a higher frequency.

“I guess not, not that she ever—I asked her if it—I’m not a _psychic_. I don’t know what—I thought girls, they don’t—you don’t want to be selfish. You need to make sure to get them off, and I thought I—I tried to do that. I thought I did.” 

“I’m sure you did,” Margo says, soothingly. She’s sure of no such thing, but she’ll let Q have this one. “But there’s more to sex than that. And it seems like Alice needed something more.” 

Quentin’s sheer frustration comes out in a whine. “How do you do—both. How do you even _assertively_ eat someone out anyway?”

Margo could make some suggestions. Flashes of holding girls down by the hips, bringing them to the edge over and over, pulling off whenever they get close, making them squirm and beg. _Let me show you_ , Margo imagines saying. She could press the gas on the evening, accelerate. Flip Quentin over and pull down his stupid, ill-fitting pants and lick at him until he’s humping the bed. But with every strange dichotomy about sex Quentin is revealed to have internalized, the slower Margo feels the need to take things. 

When Margo tunes back in, Quentin’s still going: “...but then I guess girls like that too, right? They like guys who—you know. Take charge.”

“They do?” 

“I mean. I don’t know. Thinking about all the guys—like Julia’s boyfriend. From before Brakebills. James. She was pretty in love with him. He was this—he was on the lacrosse team. He was a business major. He was so—I don’t know. Confident.”

Good lord. It continues to be even worse than she’d thought. If Margo has read Julia right, Julia probably had “peg boyfriend” pencilled in to her calendar for alternating Wednesdays for stress relief and every Sunday to get them both in the right frame of mind for the busy week ahead, but Quentin apparently thinks his appeal lies in some kind of 1950s caricature of virility.

Julia has popped up twice in this conversation. Quentin hasn’t explicitly said anything about the nature of his feelings for her to Margo, but it’s not hard to guess. The childhood best friend. The boyfriend that is everything Quentin isn’t. Margo gathers that she and Quentin have had a falling out recently. Margo hasn’t seen her around the cottage much lately. Previously she’d been a common fixture partly because of Q and partly because despite being a knowledge dweeb girlfriend enjoyed a good party. Margo really can’t blame Quentin for his hopeless crush. Julia Wicker is pretty magnetic, and Margo definitely _would_ , but: ugh, knowledge students. 

“Mm,” is all Margo says, carefully non-committal. “Well, some girls do.” 

Margo’s still thinking. She should probably give Quentin a lecture about how women aren’t a monolith and he really needs to drop the gender essentialism, inform him in no uncertain terms that letting the moment Julia started dating the lacrosse star senior year of high school permanently reorder your universe is stupid and centering your entire understanding of human sexuality around the hurt of your own perceived failures is unsustainable. Really, it’s incredible Quentin isn’t an incel, because all the ingredients are there. A real testament to some inborn sweetness that his self-loathing takes the form of his woebegone little voice saying _he was a business major_ , and a minor miracle that Margo feels such a sense of pity and fondness mixed with her irritation. Like, it’s super fucking annoying. But perhaps fixable. 

And Margo, for some reason, wants to help him fix it. For womankind and for Quentin himself. Because of course this state of affairs is no good for Quentin either. Figuring out what someone wants and trying to give it to them is only the first part of Margo’s golden rule: the next clause is figuring out what you want and asking someone to give it to _you_. Margo watches Quentin’s furrowed brow and defeated shoulders, as he traces a pattern on Margo’s bedspread and follows the path of his finger and doesn't look at her. That might be a bit much for Quentin right this second, but he should have no problem with part one. He seems desperate to please. It’s why he’s here, after all. 

Margo finishes formulating her plan. “So you wanna learn how to take charge. OK, I can help with that.” 

Quentin squeaks a little. “Alright.” 

Margo sits up, pulls her shirt off and tosses it across the room. Enjoys Quentin’s saucer-eyes for a moment before she says, “Take your clothes off.” Because they have to get started somehow.

Which is how Margo comes to this absurd pass in her life: naked except for their underwear with Quentin Coldwater, instructing him to pin her down by the wrists. 

He’s on top of her. Margo’s wrists are crossed above her head. He’d followed Margo’s orders and pinned them to the mattress but immediately he jerked his hands back, and now they’re hovering uselessly. It means he can’t really balance his weight, and so he crushes her whole body into the bed, before he realizes, and as he says, “Oh god, sorry,” he braces himself on his arms above her, face red. He finishes with an uncertain: “Um, like—like that?” 

Margo arches her back. Breathes harder. Wriggles a little, as if fighting against the imaginary bond. 

Quentin just looks panicked. 

Margo sighs. “OK, get out. You’ve failed.”

“What?” Quentin says, almost tearfully.

He makes to get up, to flee, but Margo locks him in with her knees. “Kidding.” That was mean, but Margo had to get it out somehow. “Well, no, you _have_ failed, but don’t go anywhere.”

Quentin’s face spasms with a growing frustration that bubbles up through the surface woundedness as he says, “What do you mean? What do you want me to do, I don’t—”

“Q, what did I say the one fucking rule was? The one rule of fucking?” 

Quentin’s brow wrinkles in concentration, and when he remembers Margo’s earlier instruction he throws himself off her in a very dramatic fashion, and lies on his back on the bed, both hands over his face as he says, “But _how_ , how am I supposed to figure out what someone wants—”

Margo leans over and flicks Quentin between the eyes, hard. She’s found unprecedented, slightly unnerving reserves of patience when it comes to Quentin and his bullshit, but _really_ , there are limits. “You _ask_ , dumbass.”

Quentin slowly lowers his hands from his face. He looks at Margo, eyes wide. Something Margo can’t quite read playing over his features. 

“What do you want, Margo?” 

The tone this is delivered in doesn’t fit the context. Not an ounce of sex in it. In fact it’s the exact same tone of voice Quentin had addressed Margo in last week, when he had walked right by Margo in the cottage hallway, too absorbed in muttering down at some notes in his hand to notice anything, and she’d lept out at him from where she’d been partially obscured by the coat rack. Exactly the same words, too, said after he’d yelped and scattered index cards everywhere. The same sullen exasperation trying to cover up the fact that Margo has scared him senseless. 

“I’m going to tie you up and touch you all over.” 

Margo is startled to hear these words from her own mouth. As startled as Quentin, who emits a faint whimper. She hadn’t planned them before she said them. There’s several things she could imagine wanting to do to Quentin Coldwater, or wanting him to do to her. She could introduce him to his own ass. Or allow him the gift of going down on her. But what came out is this: the unforeseen desire to have Quentin underneath her, trembling.

Last week, when Margo had scared him, when Quentin demanded what Margo wanted of him, how had she responded? Oh, right: _To fuck with you a little._ Yes, that’s what she wants: to fuck with Quentin a little. Nicely. Sweetly. A friendly little fucking _with_ , that’s what they’re about. 

Margo decides to roll with it. “I’m going to show you how it’s done. Teach by example. Watch and learn, Coldwater.” She sits up and kneels beside Quentin, who lays there on his back, gaping like a landed fish. 

“Margo, I don’t...” 

“Do you not want to do that?” Quentin is already shaking his head in protest as Margo goes on, “You have to tell me if you don’t. We aren’t going to do anything you don’t want to do, Q.” 

“No, I. Uh. You touching me, that sounds. Good. Tying me up, um—I don’t know. But. I don’t understand why you would. Want to do that.” 

OK, Margo’s getting pretty fed up with this. “Q, if you’d fuck a girl even while believing she can’t bear to view your hideous troll form, that’s pretty messed up.” 

Margo almost feels bad when she glimpses the wretched look on Quentin’s face. Almost. Although she’s right and she stands by it, the force of a self-loathing so deep that it makes Quentin believe that every desired touch is something granted to him on sufferance is suddenly like a third person in the room with them. Which is _ridiculous_ , Quentin is perfectly attractive. If you’re into his sort of thing. And there are people who are. Eliot, for example, is _very_ —

“I’m going to show you,” Margo says before Quentin can apologize. She swings a leg up and over so she’s straddling his waist. What exactly it is she’s going to show him is no longer clear.

Then Quentin Coldwater is spread out before her. His eyes widen even further as he feels the heat of her against him, through her underwear. They’re lined up in a way that if he was hard Margo would feel his dick against her ass. He’s isn’t, not yet. Too on edge. She feels the fabric of his boxers—when she’d seen those earlier she’d really had a moment of intense soul-searching when she’d had to acknowledge to herself that she still fully intended to sleep with him. 

Quentin looks up at her. Swallows. His hands clench in the comforter, and pink creeps up his sternum. When they’d stripped down earlier he’d snuck little glances at Margo and then away, like he couldn’t quite believe he was allowed, but now, overcome, he looks. Shifts underneath her. 

“Grab the headboard,” Margo commands. “Both hands.” 

Quentin’s eyebrows do that thing where they try very hard to meet in the middle of his forehead, and look saddened and weary when they can’t quite manage the reunion. “I thought you said you were going to tie me up,” he says. 

“Too involved,” Margo murmurs distractedly, her own eyebrows rising in surprise at this change in Quentin. All it took was someone else taking the reins and he’s relaxed a bit, enough to deliver this in a familiar tone of dry, bemused humor. A good sign. That blotchy red of anxiety and hopefully the beginnings of lust has reached Quentin’s neck, but he complies with Margo’s instructions, raising his arms above his head and gripping the bars of her headboard with both hands.

“Good boy,” Margo says. Quentin rolls his eyes but Margo can feel the depth of his indrawn breath, from the way it moves his belly underneath her. 

Now Margo can look. Quentin is pacified for the moment, looking at her, distracted from awareness of how he’s on display by Margo on display. His eyes are glued to her breasts. His breathing picks up, and Margo thinks she can feel signs of life from his dick. She’s flattered that her tits still have the power to move him, after he got to look at Alice Quinn naked, however briefly. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe they did it in the dark, through a sheet, because Quentin is getting really worked up. Margo isn’t knocking on herself. But it’s simply a matter of honor to acknowledge when you’re outmatched, and when it comes to Alice’s incredible rack, Margo definitely is.

This is the accompanying track that runs underneath her perusal of Quentin’s nakedness. Hirsute forearms. A nearly hairless chest. Surprisingly defined shoulders. Pale skin, kind of unhealthy looking. Like he’s a Victorian consumptive, like he’s never felt the sun on his skin. Small pink nipples. Margo finds her hands following the path her eyes have charted. She puts her palm on Quentin’s stomach, and slides it up to rest on the lurching, erratic thump of his heart. His skin is very warm and very soft. A miracle, like his bafflingly beautiful hair. He definitely doesn’t condition or moisturize. The little patch of hair on his chest is scratchy against her fingertips. 

Finally, the increased wriggling Margo has noticed beneath her becomes impossible to ignore. She brings her gaze up to Quentin’s face and is surprised to find his eyes closed. She can feel his erection against her, but she wonders how long his eyes have been closed. 

Margo rolls his nipple under her finger, and his eyes fly open. He squeaks. 

“Hi,” Margo says, idly playing with his nipple, feeling it draw up tight as Quentin lets out a shuddering breath. His eyes are comically wide, and he looks like he’s about to go off in his dumb underwear, just from this. Jesus. “Am I boring you?”

Quentin’s laugh is a little wild. “Uh, no. But are you—are you done?” 

“Kind of sounds like I’m boring you,” Margo says. Touching Quentin Coldwater’s nipples, listening to the soft sounds of surprise falling from his slack mouth at being touched in this way, watching his entire body ripple out from her fingers on him, the occasional little jerks like he’s been electrocuted. Quentin always seems like one raw nerve, and now Margo gets to watch the upside of that flayed open endless _reaction_ to everything. 

“Margo, you’re never boring.” It’s fascinating to watch the stuttering stop once he’s being told exactly what to do. 

“Damn straight,” Margo affirms. “You don’t like me looking at you? You like looking at _me_ , right?”

Quentin snorts. Small stalled movements of his hips, like he doesn’t quite dare to rub up against her, but he can’t entirely help himself. “Yeah, because you’re gorgeous, come on.”

“So are you,” Margo says, matter of fact, and it makes Quentin dare a ruder sound of disbelief. Margo pinches his nipple in retaliation, but it only makes him moan. 

Margo means it. Quentin isn’t the type that usually gets her panties wet, but everyone is gorgeous, given the chance. The right lighting, the right circumstances. These are Quentin’s: trembling beneath her, just as she predicted. 

“Close your eyes,” Margo instructs. Quentin looks at her in shock. Like he hadn’t even realized that he’d closed his eyes before, that he’d gotten harder from Margo’s eyes laying him open, drinking her fill of him while he shivered and sealed his gaze against it. 

Quentin obeys on a big shuddering breath. Margo ghosts her fingers up his sides and he squirms.

“Ticklish?”

“That’s—that’s dang—ha ha—dangerous information for you to have,” Quentin says. “Mar _go_.” But he’s being so good for her, white-knuckling the headboard, eyes squeezed tightly shut, so she’ll oblige. 

Margo gets off of him and Quentin gives a little gasp at the sudden removal of her weight and warmth. “I’m not going anywhere,” she assures him. On impulse she leans forward to drop a kiss to his throat, right over his leaping pulse. 

Then she shifts down the bed and contemplates the existential question of Quentin Coldwater’s underwear. There’s a spell that could remove them by magic, and she imagines the noise Quentin would make on feeling the air on his exposed dick. Instead she tucks her fingers under the waistband and says, “I’m gonna take these off, OK?”

There’s a long moment of hesitation before he nods. Margo is gentle as she takes them off, and less gentle as she flings them somewhere behind her. Good riddance. 

Then Quentin is totally naked before her. She looks at his face first. Crumpled as if in pain with the brutal awareness of being looked at. He’s turned his face to the side and is rubbing his cheek against his arm as if to soothe himself. 

“Q,” Margo says softly. Touches his hip. She wants to say _we don’t have to_ but she thinks that maybe they do. Quentin has had sex, even if not that much of it, but has never yet submitted himself to this, to being looked at and weighed as an object of desire. That seems sad to Margo. In some way it seems like it should be freeing, but really it’s trapped Quentin somewhere beyond human reach. Margo wants to give Quentin the gift of that knowledge. She can’t quite manage the straightforward enthusiasm he deserves, but she still can let him know she approves. Of the fact of his body, of his wants. 

Margo looks at Quentin’s hard cock, leaking against his belly. His embarrassment hasn’t caused his erection to flag at all. It’s perfectly average, perfectly proportional to the rest of him. Compact, but with a surprising heft. Like his thighs, which are way more defined than Margo would have guessed. Powerful, hairy. Calves that are—no other word for _it—shapely_. 

“You don’t like this,” Margo says, as she wriggles out of her own underwear. 

Quentin huffs, but maybe Margo was onto something with the command to close his eyes, because speech seems to come easier now. 

“I don’t think I’m a, a _hideous troll_ , or whatever, but I know I’m not—not much to look at. I mean, not in comparison with…” 

“With James the business major?” 

Quentin actually laughs a little. Margo leans against his propped leg, let’s him feel her warmth. Scritches in the dense hair on his upper thigh with her nails. He shivers and his cock jumps, a pearlescent drop beading at the tip, but he answers her in a voice that shakes only slightly. “Yeah, or with Alice, or _you_ , so…”

“Why _do_ you think anyone has sex with you, then?”

“If it’s not my looks and it’s not my winning personality, you mean?”—and Margo wants to say _there_ , that’s it, right there: that wry amusement at Quentin’s mouth, with an unexpected gentleness in it, that’s why they’re both naked on her bed on a Thursday evening—“Pity, I guess.”

Margo makes a noise of true disgust. “I absolutely do not pity fuck anyone, Q.” She can’t explain it to him, her revelation just now, anymore than she could explain it to herself, so she falls back on unsatisfying shorthand. “You’re cute. Trust me. I can’t go five seconds without hearing about it.” 

“Wait, what?” Quentin says in bewilderment. 

Shit. Fuck. God, there’s no way Quentin doesn’t know, right? There’s no way. It’s not like any effort has been made to hide it. 

“Come on. You landed a hottie like Alice.” Margo says. She feels sorry to have brought it up when she sees an unhappy frown on his face. “You beat me to it. A rare L for me, I’m still mad about it.” 

“Sorry. Maybe if you had warned me about turning into a goose and flying to Antarctica and—” 

Quentin cuts himself off abruptly. 

“One day I’ll get the full story out of you. I knew you two were hiding something, you were so fucking weird about it.”

“There were, um. Special circumstances. Alice was probably right, we weren’t—she wasn’t herself.” 

“There’s nothing special about it. Everyone hooks up at Brakebills South. It’s a survival mechanism to prevent your tits from freezing and dropping off.”

“Yeah, well that’s all I got. I couldn’t believe it either. Like you said—I’m not _that_ cute.” 

“Maybe it was your thighs in those horrible pajamas. Seriously, what is with that? How did this happen?” Margo could enumerate Quentin’s physical charms until she’s blue in the face and it would do nothing to convince him that reasons of simple lust were probably sufficient to account for Alice sleeping with him and that simple incompatibility is why she stopped. But still, she's gotta ask.

“My thighs?” Quentin says with a touch of hysteria, and when Margo straddles one of the thighs in question, he gasps. Margo knows what he feels. The soft warmth of her cunt against him. The faint rasp of the small patch of hair on her mons. “Fuck, _Margo_. Um, I—I run?”

“You _run_? I’ve never seen this. I’ve never seen you engage in physical activity of any kind. Or move more quickly than a brisk walk.” Margo starts to move her hips in tiny circles, against Quentin’s strong warm furred upper leg. She clenches her own legs tight around muscle and bone and releases, contracting and dilating in an unconscious rhythmic pattern. It sends a rush of blood to her clit, and traps it, concentrates it. 

“Ha! Uh, yeah, I mostly do it at night, when I have trouble sleeping.” 

“How did that start?” 

“In high school, after I—my mom thought it would help. I was anxious and miserable and you know, exercise and endorphins, it’s supposed to help your mood or whatever.” Quentin bites his lip and moves his leg in a slow rock against Margo. “Fuck, sorry, that’s not—sexy. Is this alright? Is this what you want?” 

Even something as basic as running, the burn in the muscles, the pumping of the blood: done under the cover of darkness. Margo is trying to avoid shoddy psychoanalysis with Quentin, but he makes it so easy. 

Still, even the ignored body knows what to do. Quentin starts to rock his leg back and forth more actively, starts to instinctually meet Margo’s flow. 

“You’re doing fine, you’re fantastic,” Margo says with a laugh. Fuck, this is good, surprisingly good. She feels warmth flood up from the heat trapped between her pussy and Quentin’s leg all the way to her navel. “Like I said, your legs, Q, what the hell. You should run with me. We’ll get you some little shorts, you’ll be a hit.” 

Quentin laughs, the first real laugh of the night. His eyes are still closed, the muscles of his arms quivering as he tightens and releases his fingers on Margo’s headboard. His brow is creased with the great force of his concentration; his cock still hard, bouncing with the increased vigor of their movements. Margo gets her hand on his cock, hot and slippery, and Quentin goes _ah ah ah_ , high-pitched and shocked. He almost twitches away from her, only to roll back towards her on a wave, meeting her where she’s grinding against him, welcoming Margo’s wet, her heat. 

“Can I—I feel like I should be doing something,” Quentin pants. He rolls his head back against Margo’s pillow, restless and overwhelmed, pinned. She jerks him off as she slides forward a little, so her knee is snug against his balls and perineum, giving him something to rock back on. 

“You are, this is great,” Margo says dreamily. Goodness sparking along her skin. She simply feels _good_ , loose and happy, bouncing and writhing on her friend Q’s bent thigh. 

“Yeah?” Quentin says, doubting her on a groan. 

This is why Margo rarely fucks putative straight guys. No imagination.

“Listen, this right here features in my top three orgasms. Me and this girl, she was Russian—no, Czech. Anetka, god, her fucking _thighs_ , we did this for hours. She was on the Olympic hockey team.”

Quentin goes still, although it takes Margo a moment to notice. 

“Really?” 

“Yes. We went back to her hotel room and I rode her thigh and—” Margo stills the movements of her hips, stops stroking Quentin’s cock. She turns her hand over and traps the head of his dick in her cupped palm, up against his belly, and moves her wrist in small, tight circles. She moves her knee with a steady, firm pressure against his taint, and Quentin shudders all over and moans, loud and unashamed, “—I touched her, like this.” 

Not exactly like this, obviously—but she’d touched Anetka’s cunt the same way, the heel of her hand in a tight dirty grind against her clit, knee broad against the slick open of her. 

“Like—like—so I’m a girl, in this scenario?” Quentin’s shaking all over, fine little tremors breaking out across his body in the wake of his question, as Margo starts to circle her hips again, in time with the way she’s moving her hand on Quentin’s cock. 

“You’re a 6’1” hot Olympic hockey dyke, in this scenario,” Margo replies, laughing. Maybe this is what Quentin needs. Being Quentin seems so laborious, so taxing. She wants to show him how to slip into another skin and catch yourself sideways. 

Quentin giggles. “That’s—flattering? Ah, ah— _fuck_ , ha, but _that’s_ what I was questioning. Like was she _really_ on the Olympic team?”

Margo laughs again, at the depths of Quentin’s strangeness, to even think of that in this moment. “I mean, I didn’t run a background check, but that’s what she told me. You can ask Eliot.” 

“El—Eliot?” 

Fuck. Margo hadn’t intended to bring Eliot up, to bring him into this room. He hadn’t wanted to be here. Margo didn’t fucking understand why, but she was willing to respect his _boundaries_ , even in her own mind. Now he floods in through every bend and twist in her brain, filling every nook and cranny of her mind that he usually occupies. 

Margo doesn’t answer, because Quentin is coming against her palm, and she moves to jerking him through it, aiming his cock so that white strips his belly, his chest. Margo moves faster, more frantically against Quentin, losing her rhythm. 

Of course Eliot had been there, to hear this girl tell Margo stories about the Sochi Olympics, before he found a thin and wan poetic type with huge eyes and a terrible haircut to cry on him for the night, no _thank_ you. Margo hadn’t begrudged that the girl might have been lying, in whole or in part. Margo and Eliot had most certainly been lying themselves, that late-summer evening in Berlin. Trying on their different skins.

Margo and Eliot have been, including but not limited to:

\- Dissolute children of a British lord  
\- Despotic heirs to an oil fortune  
\- Siblings  
\- (See above; one or the other of them as the lately discovered byblow with a _special_ relationship to the legitimate sibling)  
\- Separated at birth as a part of an experiment  
\- Married  
\- Yokels, fresh off the Times Square Olive Garden, eager for corruption  
\- Spies (this posed obvious challenges)  
\- Margo as a gold-digger aiming to steal Eliot’s money  
\- Eliot as a gold-digger aiming to steal Margo’s money  
-Descendants of the Romanovs  
-Pretenders to the French throne  
-Royalty of a fake country (done at a magical retreat without Internet)  
-Royalty of real countries: who knows anything about the Danish royal family?  
-Eliot as a gigolo, yearning for freedom from his keeper's tyrannical demands  
-Cult escapees  
-Once Margo had been Eliot’s hot stepmom?  


Margo can sense her orgasm building within her, with that feeling she remembers from middle school, from that first discovery of her body and its wonders. A deep inward feeling, a stone-fruit feeling: a pit somewhere in her stomach, right at the center of her. Secretive and red-hot and glowing and growing. She angles her body forward a bit and grinds her clit right up against Quentin where he’s firm and unyielding against her dissolving, where he’s slippery and warm with her. 

(Thinking of Quentin’s incredulity, his _wait, only this?_ Margo remembers Eliot’s similar disbelief, his doubt regarding the jokes about girls and their pillows. So Margo had shown him. Grabbed the firmest pillow on her bed and folded it in half and stuck it between her legs and started to rock back and forth while Eliot watched, fascinated. Margo had closed her eyes and focused on that tiny waking sun within as she humped a pillow while Eliot laughed and stroked her leg with the tips of his fingers and looked at her with lazy fond eyes, anthropological and enamored, and the teasing pressure on her clit from the pillow and from the contractions of her thigh muscles sparked up along Margo’s veins until she was sweaty and whimpering and coming. 

Yes, only this.) 

It had been a lot of work to keep Eliot at bay, and Margo is angry at how futile it was in the end. Futile from the beginning, really. The whole time she hadn’t been able to banish the ghostly second self who looked out at Quentin from behind Margo’s eyes, as she catalogued and weighed the thing he yearned for but inexplicably refused to be here to see for himself. 

God, she’d had this fantastic idea, and for what? Eliot, sunglasses on while he smoked away his hangover at the window—one morning several weeks ago he’d informed her that Quentin had been dumped and since Q was pretty torn up about it it was their duty as his friends to provide succor in this dark hour. OK, sure. From the start, she’d accepted Quentin’s place in her and Eliot’s two-pointed circle with little fuss. Eliot wanted him, and Margo wanted Eliot to get what he wanted. Also she was fond of the dork. So Margo had gotten some of the good shit from Hoberman and gotten Q alone and lent her sympathetic ear in order to get the real story, or at least the part of the story that Eliot had missed. Which was that Alice had apparently told Quentin—or implied, it wasn’t entirely clear what she’d said and what Quentin had merely inferred—that the sex was not good. 

Her idea had everything.

Provide comfort to Quentin with their sexual prowess? Check.

Eliot finally gets to make a move on the boy he’d been lusting after for nearly a year? Check.

(And Eliot _was_ hopelessly hung up on Coldwater. Margo didn’t believe for a second his sudden bullshit about how _we’re friends now, Margo, why ruin a good thing_. When had that ever stopped _them_? How would it ruin anything? The endless string of slight brown-eyed boys at Encanto Oculto didn’t lie, Eliot’s crestfallen face when they got back from Ibiza and learned that Alice and Quentin were together didn’t lie.)

Teach Quentin a lesson about friendly, low-stakes screwing, that everything didn’t have to be on an epic scale? Check.

Do a solid for women everywhere, or at least a handful of hypothetical women, by teaching Quentin how to get a girl off? Check.

Do a solid for men everywhere, or one specific man, and gently reveal to Quentin that maybe he wasn’t so straight after all, like, come _on_? Check.

Eliot did not immediately clap his hands and go _thank you Bambi, my stunning genius, finally you are on board and bored enough to help with my long-deferred plans of seduction!_ He’d looked sick, and panicked. Then he’d gotten angry with her. 

_That’s not what Quentin needs right now. He needs friends, not people who are going to treat him like a piece of meat. He just got dumped. It’d be taking advantage._

Margo’s thighs are shaking. She’s coming, eyes shut as her frustration mounts and scenes of their argument play across her closed lids.

_This is being a friend. Quentin’s an adult, I’m not going to pressure him into anything. It’s an offer he can take or leave._

The fight went out of Eliot quickly. He’d sighed and handed her a drink and said _Bambi, do what you want. Really. You could be right. It might be good for him. But I_ — _I_ _can't, alright?_

On the way out of the room, he’d paused with his hand on the doorknob. _Just_ — _be good to him, okay?_

She had to admit that last bit had stung. 

Margo blinks her eyes open on a gasp. She’s been good to him, alright. Quentin, this highly inconvenient boy unexpectedly flung down in the midst of Margo’s life, lies before her sweating and flushed covered in his own come, in her. Not a bad look. His eyes are open and he’s looking up at her, breathing hard. 

“You should be spanked.” Margo intended that to come out differently. _Ooh, you wanna spanking, opening your eyes before I told you to?_ Instead it comes out with an air of pronouncement, of recognized natural law. Quentin Coldwater should be spanked.

He laughs, totally overcome. Margo slides off to lay beside him with an exhausted thump. 

They lie together, gasping in the aftershocks. Margo feels slightly worse than when they started.

After a second Quentin says: “You failed.” 

Margo turns to look at him. “ _Excuse_ me?” 

Quentin expression is far too smug. “You never asked me what _I_ wanted.” 

Margo starts to laugh. She wasn’t so sure just now if she was going to bone him again, but Quentin’s keeping her on her toes. “We both just got off so I think you’re _fine_ but yeah, I concede your point. Bad form. What do you want, Q?”

“Can I kiss you?” He must see something of her internal jerk of revulsion cross her face, because he laughs, the asshole, and says: “No, not like—but can we, you know, make out a little? I like that. I’d like to kiss you.”

Margo’s eyes feel suspiciously tight. “Yeah, honey. Sure. I like that too.” She turns to her side, and Quentin turns to her, and she kisses his hot wet mouth. 


	4. april 2, 2016

Fucking Quentin is a lot more fun than Margo thought it was going to be. 

Obviously she thought it’d be a decent time, or she wouldn’t have done it in the first place. Still, she’d viewed it mostly as an act of generosity, a noble bestowing of her hard-won expertise. A rarely indulged spirit of philanthropy provides an excitingly novel form of pleasure. 

Margo had told Quentin she didn’t pity fuck anyone but you know actually, like, maybe just a little. 

Quentin’s a fascinating specimen. He has such a strange constellation of inherited rigid ideas about sex, but little of the typical resistance to having those assumptions overturned. Margo guesses that unlike most people, and most men particularly, Quentin is actually desperately eager to be told his conception of himself is, in fact, all wrong. 

Also he is really, really, _really_ into eating her pussy. So. 

There’s only one drawback to this fun little interlude, but it’s a big one.

She can’t tell Eliot about any of it.

Margo has tried. He’s been so weird about the whole thing but maybe the only way forward was to brazen through it. 

“So me and Q…” she’d begun after that first time, only to see a pained spasm ripple over Eliot’s face. Only for a second. 

Then he’d pasted on a smirk and replied: “Have fun?”

It was strange to realize Eliot was acting a part with her. Painful. 

She’d grinned back at him and said: “Yeah, it was,” and Eliot’s relief was evident when they quickly moved on to something else.

If Margo thought for a second that sleeping with Quentin would jeopardize her relationship with Eliot, she would obviously quit immediately. But things continue as normal. She and Eliot hang out, and Eliot is doing well. 

Margo perches on the bathroom counter to watch Eliot reapply his eyeliner in the bathroom mirror between classes and tells her about the alum he's sleeping with. Margo stares down any first year who does a dramatic double take at a woman in the men’s bathroom. 

“So how’s the fucking?” Margo flicks a flaking piece of polish off her nail. She needs to get those done.

“Good. I mean, it would have to be.” 

“Why? What terrible attribute does this Mike have to make up for? He’s OK looking. A lot of flannel, he’s sort of personified flannel, but—”

But that’s apparently exactly Eliot’s type. There’s a pregnant silence where the choice to deliberately ignore this lives. 

“He’s, uh,” Eliot is really overdoing his waterline, carefully not meeting Margo’s eye. She winces. “Well. The words socially liberal—”

“Oh, sweetie, no.”

“—and fiscally conservative may have been spoken. Also #NeverTrump. Also...registered Republican.”

“ _Ugh_ ,” says a voice from the urinals.

Margo snaps her fingers in the direction of the sound of piss hitting porcelain, and then snaps them at Eliot. “Exactly, Hoberman. Exactly.” (Josh had just given a cheery little wave on seeing her.)

So Eliot is doing...fine. He’s fine. 

She and Eliot and Quentin also hang out, and it’s mostly not weird or awkward at all. The fact that Quentin and Margo are getting each other off on a regular basis is simply not referred to. 

Quentin has a lot going on. Like, emotionally. Fucking Margo is probably a footnote, which is kind of offensive and refreshing at the same time. This is probably the reason they still hang out so much and ignore whatever undercurrents of sexual drama seethe between the three of them—Eliot believes Quentin needs support. Quentin believes Quentin needs support. He got dumped, and then there was some horrible falling out with Julia. Margo had tried to commiserate with Julia about her own recent heartbreak, because Margo is a bit of an expert being screwed by hedge bitches, but had been firmly frozen out. So she guesses Quentin has gotten both Eliot and Margo in the divorce, which isn’t super fucking mature of Wicker, but Margo gets the sense that whatever is going on with both of them is operating at a very juvenile level psychologically, so fine. Still, it seems Julia is getting comfort from somewhere, as Margo discovers by chance one day. Exactly where is...interesting. Also problematic, for certain people.

So Margo’s glad when she walks across the Cottage and sees Quentin and Eliot sprawled on a blanket together she can walk right up without worrying about things getting uncomfortable. Or at least not any more uncomfortable than her news is gonna make it.

“Q,” she says after she’s settled, sprawled against Eliot’s legs. “Have you run into Julia lately? Or Alice?”

Quentin’s head jerks up from his book, shooting Margo a wounded look for her rank betrayal in speaking those names. “I mean, I try to avoid it. So do they. Why?”

“Well,” Margo straightens her skirt. “I saw them over by Worf Fountain. They looked...friendly. And that’s new, right?”

There had been an unease, between Quentin’s oldest friend and his girlfriend. Alice had seemed resentful of her, and Julia’s somewhat forced friendliness had made as little headway with Alice as Margo’s _totally genuine friendliness, thanks_ , had. 

“What the fuck,” Quentin says.

“Margo,” Eliot chides. 

“What?! I just wanted Quentin to be prepared!” Having your ex-girlfriend and ex-best friend develop a friendship would be rough for anyone, but is probably especially horrifying to Quentin. 

“You don’t have to, to gleefully share it like it’s some piece of—hot gossip.”

“Oh,” Margo says. “I literally cannot help that, sorry.” 

“I know, Bambi,” Eliot coos with a soothing pet to Margo’s hair. He’s already stroking Quentin’s shoulder, as Quentin vibrates with consternation and self-pity. Like this is what God gave him two hands for. 

“People can be friends. They can be friends. It’s none of my business.” Quentin looks like he’s barely holding back from throwing himself down wailing and beating his fists against the brightly patterned picnic blanket. His mouth is twisted with misery. “They, uh, do you think—are they? Friends?” 

Sure, that’s one word for it. Margo thinks she had actually been delicate in delivering this news, considering when Margo had come across Julia and Alice sitting on a bench, Julia with one hand entwined in Alice’s on Alice’s black-skirted lap and the other rubbing Alice’s shoulder soothingly, Julia had looked up and met Margo’s eye with a hard stare, like, _yeah, run back and tell him, bitch_.

Quentin’s having a difficult month. But hey, at least he gets to fuck Margo, and at least if she has to put up with his delicate nerves she is also having fun fucking him and he’s not a Republican. 

It's just that not being able to tell Eliot about any of it is a big negative when it comes to Margo’s sexual satisfaction. Margo likes sex, and she’s good at it. Part of her enjoyment has always been telling other people about it. Making a story of it redeems even the most lackluster lay, and casts a satisfying, deepening glow around fantastic sex. Before Eliot sex was less good because of the weaknesses of Margo’s audiences: a handjob in a Porsche that led to the gurgling death of her father’s love for her or fooling around on someone’s else’s parent’s bed at a party with a girl who never spoke to her again or fumblings in a dorm room bed with a guy who had a girlfriend and didn't even make Margo come—no one else ever appreciated Margo’s performances, the potential that lay entirely within herself to reclaim anything if only she could find the right way to tell it and the right person to hear it. It turned out Eliot was that person. 

This is pathetic, but Margo starts internally narrating her encounters with Quentin to an imaginary Eliot. Like this: 

We were hanging out in my room. Somehow we got to talking about Coldwater’s porn viewing habits. OK, I asked. I was curious. If you’d gotten as deep and dark a look at Quentin’s sexual hangups as me, you’d be curious too. 

_I’m already curious._

Quentin has a lot of thoughts about pornography and how the chauvinistic, violent sex therein leads to the oppression of women. Also about how porn sex isn’t realistic and this lack of realism warps people’s views of sex and leads to distorted expectations about what sex is actually like. 

I also had a lot of thoughts, but Q was on a roll, gaining steam. 

“Like anal sex. It’s everywhere in porn, and it makes guys expect that every girl should do it or he’s being like, horribly denied something. And then girls do it to please them but it’s just painful.”

_Well, my unspoken but burning question about whether Quentin ever watched gay porn has been answered._

A lot there, like always. Obviously, I felt for Julia or whichever of her friends had been pressured into having her ass so abused. Nothing Quentin had said was wrong. I couldn’t let it stand though. 

“Only if you don’t do it right,” I scoffed.

Hey, I’m a feminist. It was doing battle with my dedication to good fucking, fucking well and being fucked satisfactorily, and it lost. They aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but a commitment to both can gum up the works a bit on occasion. Sure, I could have given the speech that some women liked it and some women didn’t, _everyone’s asshole is super valid_ , just listen to your partner, don’t pressure people into doing shit they don’t want, _blah blah blah_ , but it lost to the fact that Quentin was fucking _me_ at the moment.

_Ah._

“I love it, when it’s done right,” I said. I let him take that in for a minute, then said: “You wanna?” 

Quentin looked like he’d swallowed his own tongue. I could tell that the thought of fucking my ass held great appeal for him but that he also felt guilty about how much he liked it. I haven’t found the trick yet to getting Quentin to let that guilt fuel how hot he gets. I’m working on it.

“Do—do _you_ want to?”

He always does that: answers a question about his desire with one about mine. To defer responsibility, to try to get me to insist on what I want so he can hitch a ride. I only looked at him. I always make him say it.

He dragged a hand down his face with a laugh. “I never know how a night is going to go with you,” he muttered. _Isn’t that the truth_. “Yeah, I’d—I like that.” 

_Oh, fuck!_

So there is some progress. He looked nervous. Wondering what it said about him, that he did want it, wanted what those other pricks wanted. What it meant. I wanted to say: nothing, yet. _It meant what you wanted it to mean_. What you discovered it to mean, and the only way to find out is to do it.

“Hm. Eat me out and I’ll think about it.” 

Quentin had a confused, constipated look on his face, like he didn’t know if he was frustrated, and if it was even okay to be frustrated, or if he was as happy as he usually was to go down to me. Finally with a little amused twitch at the corner of his mouth to contain it all, he replied, “Okay,” and gave me a kiss on the cheek before getting on his knees.

I wasn’t just having fun making Quentin work for it. _Teaching through practice_. Much more effective. I wasn’t sure whether I was in the mood for assfucking tonight or not. You know what I mean. We’ve talked about it, and we feel similarly. It’s not something you’re always up for. _A special item on the menu._ Not rare enough to be a delicacy exactly, but something to be savored when it shows up. _Sometimes there’s nothing more unappealing._ Caught on the wrong night and it’s repulsive, no way that’s happening. _And then sometimes you might think you’re up for it but once things get going your body disagrees._

So I took my time thinking it through, as Quentin teased at me through my underwear, getting it nice and soaked. He seems to like that: evidence of enthusiasm in sartorial damage. Not that there was much he could do to hurt this particular pair, thinning elastic, the fact they predated Brakebills and magic obvious in the fact that they contained a brown period stain that Quentin was darkening with his saliva, with my arousal. Then moving the fabric aside with his fingers and licking at me, pressing these gentle little kisses to my clit, as I imagined his wide eyes, the way he could never seem to believe that he was being permitted to touch me, his shaking hands, his eagerness, the noises he’d make, the gratitude at being _allowed_ anywhere near my ass. It was gratifying. _Hot as hell_. Also surprisingly hot. Quentin’s cock was the ideal size for it— _mmm_ —when I was in this mood: not too much work, enough to get that sensation of fullness, that intensity of feeling that’s almost divorced from the question of _good_ or _bad_ but which forces me harder into my body in a way that can get me so wet when everything shakes out right. I was getting wetter just thinking about it. 

_Me too, bitch._

Yeah, that’s what we were gonna do.

That’s what I was thinking about when I realized I had lost track of what Quentin’s mouth was doing, only to feel his tongue lower than it had ever been before. Not quite on the mark, given the position of my hips and the presence of my underwear, but the intent was clear. 

I pulled Quentin up by the hair. _God, yes._ I can confirm that’s extremely satisfying to do. His face was bright red. Normally in that state of embarrassment he’d have trouble meeting my eye, you know how he gets, but past a certain horniness threshold that sometimes vanishes. 

“You like kissing me everywhere, huh.” I stroked his hair. _What a good boy_. Possibly some kind of sex savant. So ashamed as he nods and finally has to tear his eyes away from mine. Wondering if I’ll think he’s some disgusting freak and decide he’s to be forever barred from human society for wanting to eat my ass. _Precious_. Adorable. 

“Here, let me over,” I said. 

Once I was on my stomach, pillow under my hips, there was a pause. I craned my head over my shoulder to see what was what. Quentin was still flushed and he was looking down at my ass with fierce concentration. _Like an Arctic explorer examining the wastes he must traverse from the prow of his ship._ This suddenly seemed like the only correct response. Before I could ask him if everything was good back there he said, “Um, can you—lift your hips,” and I obliged so he could work my underwear off my legs. 

He parted my asscheeks with his thumbs and after a lazy tut to get everything straight, which I’d show to Quentin later because never let it be said I fell down on the job in sex magic education even if at the moment I didn’t want to disrupt his _process_ , I eased my head down to rest on my crossed arms and settled in to enjoy myself. There was another pause as he looked and I felt a prickle of annoyance. Maybe it wasn’t as hot as he’d expected. It wasn’t quite 2016 in Quentin’s sexual landscape. _So asseating isn’t de rigeur? How dull._ He’d been inspired only by the porn that started this entire thing so maybe he expected a bleached porn star asshole, I don’t know. It made me think of the time— _oh God, please let this go_ —you’d attempted that via magic as one of your various schemes to make us easy money but you’d only succeeded in turning it translucent which was “super fucking unsettling, right _,”_ that’s what you’d said furiously as you’d bent over for me— _Bambi, please_ —in my bathroom and demanded I help you fix it. The amusement from this memory distracted me from peremptory disappointment at Quentin and so the first warm swipe of his tongue came as a surprise.

_I never had anything but the firmest faith in Q, I’ll have it be noted._

That first sensation of awareness so heightened that it’s half-pleasure, half-discomfort rippled across my skin, raised the hair on my arms. A moment where my mouth opened in shock, emitted something between a gasp and a laugh. Every time, there’s a beat where it feels wrong to be touched there in this way, by something as soft and wet and insinuating as a tongue. It got me more turned on instantly, and I squirmed back against Quentin’s face, laughing, wriggling, finding it hard to stay still. 

It made Quentin _moan_. Although I gotta take a moment to say he did not come to me with any natural talent for eating pussy, he’s a quick learner, and there was a gratifying enthusiasm to smooth over that awkward place before he gained the necessary precision, where he just sort of rooted around down there. _Like a pig at a trough_. Gross. _Sorry_. OK, but yes. Like a little baby kitten searching for the teat. _That is a thousand times worse_. I’d been surprised at how hard I’d found myself working not to laugh at how at first he just kind of mashed his whole face against me in a way that made me feel nothing at all, because the little whimpers of pained arousal, the throaty long moans, were so...sweet. 

And you told me to be good to him.

_Asked you._

Right then, enthusiasm was all that was required. I could feel the way he opened his jaw wide to lick at me, the point of his nose as it dug into my pubic bone. Just going for it, making these little groans and grunts and hums of eagerness. It felt good but I moaned and writhed like it was fantastic. You know, I think people have a real lack of nuance around the subject of faking it?The moans that are almost forcibly pulled out of you, from somewhere deep within, and the ones you willfully offer up, can be equally good. I’ve had people pull back and look at me skeptically, suspecting I was putting on a show. Which: yes, duh, of course. _Like, grow up._

The sound of my own enjoyment set up a closed-circuit loop of pleasure. It made me wetter and the wetter I got, both in my cunt and the way my ass was getting slick from Quentin’s saliva as it opened to his mouth, the louder I moaned. Quentin responded perfectly, whining, fingers digging hard into my ass.

_Fuck._

I got my fingers on my clit and rubbed in tandem with Quentin’s movements. Feeling a throb between my legs, an increasingly intense feeling of emptiness. Quentin pulled back a bit, almost panting for air, and I could picture the sight I made, the one that made him gasp and frantically pet the flats of two fingers over my wet open cunt.

“Your fingers,” I demanded, and laughed as he fit just the first knuckle of his middle and ring fingers into me, no more depth possible at this angle, and pressed his face into me gracelessly in his eagerness. “Wait, wait,” I said, and although it was a delicious frustration to take my hand away from my clit I reached around so I could hold myself open for Quentin, so he could kiss at my asshole while also rocking his fingers into me. It was a strain on my arms, a position I couldn’t hold long even with my impressive flexibility, ridiculous and inefficient, my grip already slipping and my shoulders aching, but that was what was great about it: it was provisional and messy and desperate, lacking the guaranteed pleasure that I’d get from moving to my back and letting Quentin lick at me while I fucked myself with a toy.

We got there, me lying on my back and Quentin kneeling between my legs, his face unattractively blotchy and the saliva drying on his jaw, as he worked a finger into my ass. Eyes fixed hungrily on my fingers circling my clit as I took a deep breath and bore down. 

“Margo, is it, you’re so—” 

Tight _,_ he wanted to say. But he felt bad about it. So I helped him out.

“Am I tight, baby?” It’s part of the fun: rolling your eyes and writhing and saying in a breathy voice _oh fuck, your big cock_ , acting like you’re being split open, _like you think it’s just fucking impossible that they’ll ever fit it in there._

Quentin nodded and made a small broken noise, mouthed a sloppy kiss against my knee. “You’re so tight,” he echoed quietly. 

Eventually Q was on his knees behind me while I knelt in front of him. I felt his shaky breath on the back of my neck. I’d gotten a toy out and it was vibrating against my clit as he pressed the head of his cock against my asshole at the same time I lowered myself down, muscles in my thighs burning.

That bizarre pop feeling as the head of a dick finally pushes in made me giggle at the same time Quentin gasped, and then as he slowly and carefully pushed forward my gasps joined his, high and almost yelping.

Quentin stilled, shuddered. I could feel how sweaty his thigh was under my hand. “Are you—is it—am I hurting you?” His forehead pressed to my shoulder, mouth lipping it at it toothlessly.

_Aw, like a puppy._

This was the moment where I’d usually squirm, bite my lip to set the stage for myself, say vapidly, _No, just—it’s a lot to take._ Instead of sharing what was really happening, which is that the first little bit of having anything bigger than fingers in my ass always makes me face the question of whether what I was feeling was being fucked or—

_Needing to take a shit._

“Fine, fine. There’s just always a second where it feels like I have to take a shit,” I said, laughing. It just felt like something I could say to Quentin. 

_Oh my God, really? Bambi. You’ll scare the baby._

Quentin stilled again, this time in surprise. “Oh, uh, really? Um, that doesn’t sound good?” Panting, slipping a little further inside, and then he was laughing too. Giggling breathlessly, giving in to absurdity, around whispers of, “Fuck, fuck, oh fuck.” 

“It is, it’s good, it passes,” I said, and it was. _Definitely a dick in there._ I was so full; my skin broke out in shivers all over. I could feel my blood in my fingers, in my toes, in my nipples. I flicked the vibrator to a higher setting and it made my legs start to tremble, made me clench rhythmically around the delicious frustration of my empty cunt, around the animal heat of Quentin. 

“Margo, you—you feel so good, oh my god. You’re _s-so tight_.” Pressing his face into my hair in shame, his hands going to my hips, and then one hand slipping around to my pussy. His fingers are very nice, but they weren’t needed at the moment, so I smacked his hand away.

“Just fuck me, Q,” I said. “That’s your only job.” 

And he did, with a choked off moan. Started fucking into me, slamming his hips up, his hands gripping my hipbones tightly.

After I came once, he paused, exhausted, and I did the work, shaking all over as I fucked myself back on him and at the same time I worked myself over with the toy. I knew he could feel the way I tightened every time I got close because he bit me, hard, on the shoulder. _Ooh_. He quickly tried to pull back and I just as quickly reached around to grasp his head in a tight clamp, to press it hard to my shoulder, and he got the message and started to suck at my skin, desperate, just as his hips started to fuck up into me gracelessly.

“I’m—Margo, I’m gonna…”

“Don’t you dare,” I hissed. I wanted to come again with him inside me. This was a gamble: from experience I knew being commanded to do anything could either freeze him up enough with terror to stave off orgasm or could make him go off immediately.

This time it worked the way I wanted. I’d orgasmed again and it felt like he’d worked a good bruise into my shoulder by the time he came. 

“You really do like it,” Quentin said softly, a bit later. Almost to himself. 

“Have I ever lied to you?” I said, knocking my knee into his playfully. He snorted. We laid side by side and it was companionable, easy. I looked at him and smiled. I looked down at his body, the sheen of sweat on his chest, his silly vulnerable cock, the sheets tangled around his legs. My eye fell on his hand, which was touching the toy on the mattress between us, where it was slick from my body. 

When I picked it up Quentin snatched his hand back. The first time I’d gotten out my box of sex toys, Quentin’s huge eyes making me very unsexily feel like an out-of-work circus clown at a child’s sad birthday party, he’d shown an instant fascination. Touching them gently, worrying his lip with his teeth. He’d asked, “Can I, um—can I use one on you?” Hey, no better way to weed out worthless dudes. If they’re threatened by anything battery powered or bigger than their dick you can kick them out of bed, no further information necessary. 

As I held the vibrator to Q’s lips my mind flashed to memories of Quentin sucking my slick off his own fingers, of Quentin gratefully cleaning his own come from my proffered hand. I could see it already: the pink dart of Quentin’s tongue flitting out to taste. Instead he widened his jaw and sucked the toy into the wet red cavern of his mouth. _Jesus_. His eyes closed and I heard him emit a small, wounded moan around the weight of the toy on his tongue as he suckled. 

I pushed his hair off his forehead as he sucked harder. Frantic, messy. 

Quentin’s eyes opened and they were panicked. He hadn’t expected to do this. _To want or to act on the want_? I couldn’t tell which. I stroked his hair and smiled at him and saw the panic recede a bit, a glaze of pleasure encasing it, dulling it.

“I liked it so much,” I said. “Do you want me to tell you how it felt?”

**Author's Note:**

> I am on tumblr [here](https://honeybabydichotomy.tumblr.com/).


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